Chemistry

Prof. Hidehiro Sakurai
Division of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University

Abstract

Bowl-shapedπ-conjugated compounds including partial structures of the fullerenes or cap structures of carbon nanotubes, which are called "buckybowls", are of importance not only as model compounds of fullerenes but also as their own chemical and physical properties [1]. For example, they show the characteristic dynamic behavior such as bowl-to-bowl inversion, applicable to the molecular-scale memory device [2]. In contrast, they sometimes favor stacking structure in a concave-convex fashion in the solid state [3], giving excellent electron conductivity. In this lecture, I demonstrate the first synthesis of C3v symmetric buckybowl, sumanene [4] and recent progress toward the general and facile synthetic method to construct various sumanene derivatives including asymmetric synthesis [5,6] of nitrogen-doped heterabuckybowls [7-9] and supramolecular structure [10].