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From Molecules to Materials: Engineering New Ionic Liquid Crystals Through Halogen Bonding
Published on: March 24, 2018
Formation of Halogen Bond-Based 2D Supramolecular Assemblies by Electric Manipulation
Qing-Na Zheng1,2, Xuan-He Liu1,2, Ting Chen1
1†Key Laboratory of Molecular Nanostructure and Nanotechnology and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing 100190, P. R. China.
Abstract:
Halogen bonding has attracted much attention recently as an important driving force for supramolecular assembly and crystal engineering. Herein, we demonstrate for the first time the formation of a halogen bond-based open porous network on a graphite surface using ethynylpyridine and aryl-halide based building blocks. We found that the electrical stimuli of a scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) tip can induce the formation of a binary supramolecular structure on the basis of halogen bond formation between terminal pyridyl groups and perfluoro-iodobenzene. This electrical manipulation method can be applied to engineer a series of linear or porous structures by selecting halogen bond donor and acceptor fragments with different symmetries, as the directional interactions ultimately determine the structural outcome.
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