On-surface interchain coupling and skeletal rearrangement of indenofluorene polymers

On-surface synthesis serves as a powerful approach to construct π-conjugated carbon nanostructures that are not accessible by conventional wet chemistry. Nevertheless, this method has been limited by the types and numbers of available on-surface transformations. While the majority of successful cases exploit thermally triggered dehalogenative carbon–carbon coupling and cyclodehydrogenation, rearrangement of appropriate functional moieties has received limited research attention. In a recent work, we describe the unprecedented interchain coupling and thermally induced skeleton rearrangement of (dihydro)indeno[2,1-b]fluorene (IF) polymers on an Au(111) surface under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, leading to different ladder polymers as well as fully fused graphene nanoribbon segments containing pentagonal and heptagonal rings. Au-coordinated nanoribbons are also observed. All structures are unambiguously characterized by high-resolution scanning probe microscopy. The results provide an avenue to fabricating a wider variety of π-conjugated polymers and carbon nanostructures comprising nonhexagonal rings as well as rarely explored organometallic nanoribbons. This record contains data of the calculations that support our results.