Two-Dimensional Fullerene Assembly from an Exfoliated van der Waals Template

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are commonly prepared by exfoliating bulk layered van der Waals crystals. The creation of synthetic 2D materials from bottom-up methods is an important challenge as their structural flexibility will enable chemists to tune the materials properties. A 2D material was assembled using C-60 as a polymerizable monomer. The C-60 building blocks are first assembled into a layered solid using a molecular cluster as structure director. The resulting hierarchical crystal is used as a template to polymerize its C-60 monolayers, which can be exfoliated down to 2D crystalline nanosheets. Derived from the parent template, the 2D structure is composed of a layer of inorganic cluster, sandwiched between two monolayers of polymerized C-60. The nanosheets can be transferred onto solid substrates and depolymerized by heating. Electronic absorption spectroscopy reveals an optical gap of 0.25eV, narrower than that of the bulk parent crystalline solid.