A Cycloparaphenylene Acetylene as Potential Precursor for an Armchair Carbon Nanotube

The bottom-up synthesis of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is a long-standing goal in synthetic chemistry. Producing CNTs with defined lengths and diameters would render these materials and thus their fascinating properties accessible in a controlled way. Inspired by a recently reported synthesis of armchair graphene sheets that relied on a benzannulation and Scholl oxidation of a poly(p-phenylene ethynylene), the same strategy is applied on a cyclic substrate with a short, but well defined CNT as target structure. Herein we report the synthesis of a derivatized [12]cycloparaphenylene acetylene ([12]CPPA) that was accessible employing a Sonogashira macrocyclization. The obtained macrocycle is the largest [n]CPPA reported to date and displays bright turquoise fluorescence with a large quantum yield of 77 %. The [12]CPPA can be transformed by a 12-fold benzannulation that converts each alkyne to a naphthalene and therefore allows formation of an armchair [12,12]CNT precursor. The final 72-fold Scholl oxidation to the [12,12]CNT turned out to be challenging and its optimization requires an improved synthetic strategy to produce large quantities of the final precursor. The developed approach poses a potential break through strategy for the production of CNTs and certainly incentivizes synthetic chemists to apply the same methodology for various conjugated macrocycles.