New nanocarbon hits the scene

“We were shocked to see the crystal structure of the molecule,” says Hiroyuki Isobe, a research professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo, Japan, as he describes his latest work to synthesize phenine nanotubes (pNTs). The nanotubes are analogues of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) – rolled up sheets of honeycomb carbon lattice whose discovery by Sumio Ijima in 1990 generated sustained excitement for decades. In pNTs Isobe and collaborators at the University of Tokyo, the Japan Science and Technology Agency, Riken, and Tohoku University in Japan, have replaced the atoms of a CNT with phenine rings – derivatives of benzene where each molecule is a six-membered carbon ring. The result is a nanotube with periodic vacancies giving a porous crystal structure that Isobe describes as “simply and astonishingly, beautiful”.