SPring-8, the large synchrotron radiation facility

Release Date

26 Nov, 2008

For the first time in the world, a porous oriented nano-hybrid thin polymer film was successfully synthesized as a result of joint research by Kyushu University (Setsuo Arikawa, President), Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI) (Akira Kira, Director General), and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Kenichi Iga, President).  This film has a laminated structure of organic and inorganic molecular layers at the atomic level and is crystalline, and it is therefore expected to be used as film material for electrode catalysts in fuel cells in the future.

This breakthrough was achieved by the collaboration of Hiroshi Kitagawa, professor, and Katsuhiko Kanaizuka, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, Kyushu University; Osami Sakata (senior scientist) and Rie Haruki (postdoctoral researcher) in the Research & Utilization Division, JASRI; and Mamoru Yoshimoto, professor in the Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Rubeanic acid copper, a metal complex that is an ionic conductor, has been considered a potentially useful material for electrode catalysts in fuel cells because of its high proton conductivity.  Unfortunately, it is usually amorphous, so has not been applied in devices because of its nonuniform structure.

In this study, researchers from the joint groups produced a crystalline organic/inorganic nano-hybrid film using rubeanic acid and Cu ions by their original bottom-up method.  They examined the film structure by surface X-ray diffraction using high-brilliance synchrotron radiation at the Surface and Interface Structures Beamline BL13XU of SPring-8.  Metal complexes were found to be aligned periodically at the atomic level between and inside the laminated layers, indicating the successful synthesis of a crystalline film.

This achievement is expected to provide a new method of material synthesis that can contribute to the development not only of electrode catalysts for fuel cells but also of various devices, such as organic electroluminescence elements and transistors.

This research was conducted within the theme of "Creation of Metal-Organic Hybrid Protonics and Functional Nanolayer Integrated Systems" (representative: Hiroshi Kitagawa, Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, Kyushu University) within the scope of the "Development of the Foundation for Nanointerface Technology" project by the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), and as a research proposal at SPring-8.

This research achievement was published in the 26 November 2008 Journal of the American Chemical Society as an original paper.

Publication:
"Construction of Highly Oriented Crystalline Surface Coordination Polymers Composed of Copper Dithiooxamide Complexes"
Katsuhiko Kanaizuka, Rie Haruki, Osami Sakata, Mamoru Yoshimoto, Yasuyuki Akita and Hiroshi Kitagawa
Journal of the American Chemical Society, 130 (47), pp 15778-15779, published online November 4, 2008

Schematic view of the interface bottom-up synthesis method of crystalline rubeanic acid copper.