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takyon writes:

Triangulene has been synthesized using a combined scanning tunnelling and atomic force microscope (STM/AFM):

Researchers at IBM have created an elusive molecule by knocking around atoms using a needle-like microscope tip. The flat, triangular fragment of a mesh of carbon atoms, called triangulene, is too unstable to be made by conventional chemical synthesis, and could find use in electronics. This isn't the first time that atomic manipulation has been used to create unstable molecules that couldn't be made conventionally — but this one is especially desirable. "Triangulene is the first molecule that we've made that chemists have tried hard, and failed, to make already," says Leo Gross, who led the IBM team at the firm's laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland.

The creation of triangulene demonstrates a new type of chemical synthesis, says Philip Moriarty, a nanoscientist who specializes in molecular manipulation at the University of Nottingham, UK. In conventional synthesis, chemists react molecules together to build up larger structures. Here, by contrast, atoms on individual molecules were physically manipulated using a microscope.

Triangulene is similar to a fragment of graphene, the atom-thick material in which carbon atoms are joined in a hexagonal mesh. The new molecule is made up of six hexagons of carbon joined along their edges to form a triangle, with hydrogen atoms around the sides (see 'Radical triangle'). Two of the outer carbon atoms contain unpaired electrons that can't pair up to make a stable bond.

Also at Nature, Ars Technica, Science Magazine, and Chemistry World.

Synthesis and characterization of triangulene (DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2016.305) (DX)

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