Synthesis of novel 2-d carbon materials: Sp2 carbon nanoribbon packing to form well-defined nanosheets

Abstract

The conversion of simple glucose in a salt flux results in functional carbon materials which contain larger quantities of N and S as dopants. This "salt and sugar" approach gives access to a new type of mesostructure, where single carbon ribbons terminated with oxygen and sulfur or nitrogen functionalities are "knitted" towards very homogeneous, about 10 nm thick layers with very large specific surface areas of up to 3200 m2 g-1. Aberration corrected high resolution TEM together with EELS reveals the details of this structure.