On-Surface Synthesis of sp-Carbon Nanostructures

The on-surface synthesis of carbon nanostructures has attracted tremendous attention owing to their unique properties and numerous applications in various fields. With the extensive development of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and noncontact atomic force microscope (nc-AFM), the on-surface fabricated nanostructures so far can be characterized on atomic and even single-bond level. Therefore, various novel low-dimensional carbon nanostructures, challenging to traditional solution chemistry, have been widely studied on surfaces, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, graphene nanoribbons, nanoporous graphene, and graphyne/graphdiyne-like nanostructures. In particular, nanostructures containing sp-hybridized carbons are of great advantage for their structural linearity and small steric demands as well as intriguing electronic and mechanical properties. Herein, the recent developments of low-dimensional sp-carbon nanostructures fabricated on surfaces will be summarized and discussed.

Edge Effect in Electronic and Transport Properties of 1D Fluorinated Graphene Materials

A systematic examination of the electronic and transport properties of 1D fluorine-saturated zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs) is presented in this article. One publication (Withers et al., Nano Lett., 2011, 11, 3912–3916.) reported a controlled synthesis of fluorinated graphene via an electron beam, where the correlation between the conductivity of the resulting materials and the width of the fluorinated area is revealed. In order to understand the detailed transport mechanism, edge-fluorinated ZGNRs with different widths and fluorination degrees are investigated. Periodic density functional theory (DFT) is employed to determine their thermodynamic stabilities and electronic structures. The associated transport models of the selected structures are subsequently constructed. The combination of a non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) and a standard Landauer equation is applied to investigate the global transport properties, such as the total current-bias voltage dependence. By projecting the corresponding lesser Green’s function on the atomic orbital basis and their spatial derivatives, the local current density maps of the selected systems are calculated. Our results suggest that specific fluorination patterns and fluorination degrees have significant impacts on conductivity. The conjugated π system is the dominate electron flux migration pathway, and the edge effect of the ZGNRs can be well observed in the local transport properties. In addition, with an asymmetric fluorination pattern, one can trigger spin-dependent transport properties, which shows its great potential for spintronics applications.