Today, July 23rd, the CIQUS PhD student Diego Ramón Rodríguez Lojo obtained the maximum qualification for the defense of his Doctoral Thesis entitled "Synthesis of nanosized acenes, phenes and starphenes by aryne cycloadditions, and study of their properties". His work has been supervised by Prof. Dolores Pérez and Prof. Diego Peña.
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) are highly interesting compounds due to their unique properties, especially useful for the development of new molecular materials. In the last years, the structural similarity between nanosized PAHs and graphene has promoted this interest, in particular the development the new efficient methodologies to synthesize these compounds with diverse geometries.
In this thesis, the aryne reactivity was employed in order to build nanosized PAHs with promising properties in materials science. In particular, new methods to prepare linear (acenes), angular (phenes) and three-fold symmetric (starphenes) derivatives have been developed. The photoelectronic and self-assembly properties of some of these PAHs suggest their use as organic semiconductors in molecular electronics.
