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Carbon is a magical material that can be made into soft pencil lead or hard diamond. On the 16th, nature published a study on new carbon family materials. Under normal pressure, researchers from the Institute of chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, created a new type of carbon allotrope single crystal, single-layer polymerization of C60.

Diamond, graphene, fullerene, carbon nanotubes and other materials are composed of carbon atoms, but due to the different arrangement of atoms, they show completely different physical and chemical properties, so they are called "allotropes" of carbon.

The research of new carbon isomers and the preparation of new carbon materials are always the frontier scientific problems in the field of materials. "So far, a single atom has been the smallest unit for building two-dimensional materials. It has not been possible to construct more advanced two-dimensional topological materials from the bottom-up like" bricks "by using traditional chemical reactions using nano clusters as the basic unit." Zheng Jian, a researcher at the Institute of chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said frankly.

After five years of intensive research, the researchers have successfully polymerized the nano clusters C60 on a plane by using the doping polymerization stripping two-step method, and formed regular two-dimensional topological structure material through carbon carbon bond covalent bonding, that is, single-layer two-dimensional polymerized C60 single crystal.

We found that this kind of material has good thermal stability and high band gap Zheng Jian said that this is another stable two-dimensional carbon material after graphene.

Zheng Jian said that the research has opened up a new strategy of using carbon clusters instead of atoms to construct carbon materials. At the same time, the newly prepared carbon materials have great application prospects in nonlinear optics and functional electronic devices, and also have potential application values in superconducting, quantum computing, spin transport, information and energy storage, catalysis and other fields.