LAUSR

Nanostructured carbon materials generally refer to carbons with at least one dimension (1D) in nanoscale. Since the discovery of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and graphene, carbon materials with various nanoforms are rapidly emerging as one of the most fascinating materials in the 21st century, owing to their unique electronic, mechanical, thermal, optical, and chemical properties. These features, fundamentally determined by the size, morphology, and dimensionality, have paved the way for many innovations in diverse areas of modern science and technology as well as further fostered interest in their structures and chemistry. Among various nanostructures, the anisotropic patterns with unique features in a single particle are in high demand for applications such as energy storage, biomedicine, nanomotors, catalysis, etc. Typically, the structural diversity can be achieved directly by the templating method, but synthetic procedures generally reach a limit in the principle of interfacial energy-favored isotropic growth in aqueous solutions. In this issue of ACS Central Science, Lu et al. went beyond the usual principle of tailoring nanostructures by simple surfactant/precursor micelles assembly in a surfactant solution. Instead, they detailed an asymmetric intramicellar phase-transition induced tip-to-tip assembly to fabricate anisotropic ringy templates and apply the templates for polymer coating, thus forming well-defined nanocarbon rings by further pyrolysis. While using template-directed synthesis for anisotropic nanocarbons is conceptually easy, they can be challenging owing to the rare anisotropic shapes of hard templates or the vulnerable structures of soft templates, which are sensitive to environmental perturbations. In their work, Lu and co-workers report polymer/carbon nanorings with regular shapes and hollow open interiors using structurally stable ringy micelles as templates, orientationally assembled from commercially available surfactants octadecanol and triblock copolymer F127 (Figure 1). The authors demonstrated that octadecanol added in F127 surfactant aqueous solution plays a decisive role in the formation of ringy-shaped micelles since only nanospheres are yielded without the hydrophobic octadecanol. Observations evidenced by scanning electron