Bottom-up synthesis of molecular nanodiamond from nanographene

作者：Jiaxu Liang, Christopher P. Ender, N. C. Forero-Martinez, Ilyes Batatia, Jingyi Liu, Xin Yang, Raúl González Brouwer, L. Kazak, R. Blinder, L. Cancellara, N. Tarakina, Yizhi Liu, Tobias Eklund, Mangalika Sinha, Sarah Köster, S. Bhat, Fabian Rohmann, Andreas Tangemann, Kilian Lee Gallo, Rüdiger Berger, R. Farla, A. Kubanek, K. Amann-Winkel, Manfred Wagner, F. Jelezko, Klaus Müllen, Gábor Csányi, R. Cortes-Huerto, Yingke Wu, T. Weil · 发表于：Nature · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1038/s41586-026-10669-3 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Medicine

Nanodiamonds hosting colour centres are promising building blocks for quantum technologies, enabling advances in quantum computation1,2, nanoscale NMR spectroscopy3, 4, 5–6, single-spin magnetometry7,8, wide-field quantum imaging9 and single-photon sources10,11. However, the controlled bottom-up synthesis of ultrasmall and structurally uniform nanodiamonds has remained a challenge, with existing methods producing heterogeneous materials that vary in size, morphology, impurity content and defect quality. Here we show that well-defined, hydrogen-terminated molecular nanographenes serve as chemically confined precursors for high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis of ultrasmall (3–4 nm), monodisperse and highly crystalline molecular nanodiamonds with only a single sp2 surface reconstruction and produced on a milligram scale. The same bottom-up platform also enables a two-component strategy for incorporating silicon- and germanium-based colour centres during synthesis, yielding SiV− and GeV− emitters without ion implantation, irradiation or post-treatment. Because the nanographene precursor defines both the confined carbon framework and the hydrogen content, this approach provides intrinsic, precursor-level control over nanodiamond size and composition, particularly in the low-nanometre regime relevant for biological and quantum sensing. Molecular nanographenes, ultralarge polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, therefore, establish a scalable and modular route to high-quality molecul...