Facile Synthesis of Nitrogen‐Doped Nanographenes with Joined Nonhexagons via a Ring Expansion Strategy

Synthetic methodology is considered a holy grail in both organic chemistry and materials science. Over the past few decades, researchers have explored graphene-type molecules (or nanographenes) through classic Scholl oxidative cyclodehydrogenation. Despite successes achieved with various nanographenes, development of new methods to synthesize these highly desired lags behind. Herein, we developed facile effective method produce series nanographenes bearing nitrogen (N)-doped pentagon-heptagon pairs acceptable yields. Modification heptagonal ring endowed resultant tunable physicochemical properties; for instance, M9 exhibited aggregation-caused quenching aggregation-induced emission behavior. Most strikingly, novel containing N-doped pentagon-octagon were also obtained using same synthetic strategy, demonstrating superior versatility efficiency proposed expansion method.