(Copyright: AG Doltsinis/AG Mönig)

September 2023

A team of scientists from the departments of chemistry and physics at the WWU Münster and researchers from Beijing used on-surface synthesis under extremely clean and defined conditions to realize the polymerization of N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs). The NHC units of these polymers are each connected to single gold atoms, which drastically increases their mobility on the different substrates (similar to a ballbot, i.e. a robot moving on a sphere). The detailed properties of the polymers were investigated by ultrahigh-resolution atomic force microscopy in the CeNTech labs. The study was recently published in Nature Chemistry (2023).