On January 12, 2022, Andrew Crowther, assistant professor of chemistry, in collaboration with other researchers, published an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, titled “Superatom Regiochemistry Dictates the Assembly and Surface Reactivity of a Two-Dimensional Material.” In this paper, Professor Crowther and his co-authors argue that two-dimensional material research would greatly benefit from the development of synthetically tunable van der Waals (vdW) materials.
The authors explain that the regioselective synthesis of a “superatomic” building block is designed to polymerize and assemble into a two-dimensional cyanometalate lattice whose surfaces are chemically addressable. When bulk single crystals form, the resulting vdW material can be mechanically exfoliated to create flakes with photoliable CO ligands on the surface. The study shows that bottom-up assembly of vdW materials from super atoms can be used to create two-dimensional materials with tunable physical and chemical properties.