Metallic graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) represent a critical component in the toolbox of low-dimensional functional materials technolo-gy serving as 1D interconnects capable of both electronic and quantum information transport. The structural constraints imposed by on-surface bottom-up GNR synthesis protocols along with the limited control over orientation and sequence of asymmetric monomer building blocks during the radical step-growth polymerization has plagued the design and assembly of metallic GNRs. Here we report the regioregular synthesis of GNRs hosting robust metallic states by embedding a symmetric zero-mode superlattice along the backbone of a GNR. Tight-binding electronic structure models predict a strong nearest-neighbor electron hopping interaction between adjacent zero-mode states resulting in a dispersive metallic band. First principles DFT-LDA calculations confirm this prediction and the robust, metallic zero-mode band of olympicene GNRs (oGNRs) is experimentally corroborated by scanning tunneling spectroscopy.
@article{arxiv.2302.08446,
title = {Engineering Robust Metallic Zero-Mode States in Olympicene Graphene Nanoribbons},
author = {Ryan D. McCurdy and Aidan Delgado and Jingwei Jiang and Junmian Zhu and Ethan Chi Ho Wen and Raymond E. Blackwell and Gregory C. Veber and Shenkai Wang and Steven G. Louie and Felix R. Fischer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.08446},
year = {2023}
}