Chemistry in Pictures: The littlest honeycomb

These nanoscopic hexagons are created by individual molecules fitting themselves together into a large-scale pattern. Hongchao Wang, a graduate student in the lab of Hong-Ying Gao at Tianjin University, captured this image using a scanning tunneling microscope while exploring how to control the way crown ethers self-assemble on metal surfaces. Crown ethers have a big hole in the middle, perfect for holding a metal ion (below, left). The interaction between the ethers and potassium ions affects how electrons are distributed around the molecular rings. So when the molecules get together, they form triangular structures (below, right), and when those triangles link together, they create hexagon-like shapes. Gao’s lab is mainly trying to figure out how to control the assembly process, but he says that surfaces covered with this sort of complex could be useful as catalysts.

Credit: Hongchao Wang. Read the paper about this research in ACS Nano.

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