Bottom-up fabrication of porous graphene and graphene nanoribbons

Its remarkable properties make graphene attractive for use in nanoscale devices 1 . However, graphene is semimetallic and thus not directly suitable for most electronic or optoelectronic devices, which require a semiconductor with a specific, finite bandgap. This can be overcome by structuring graphene on the nanometer scale, which opens a bandgap suitable for room-temperature applications 2 . Experimentally, nanostructured graphene and graphene-related materials are accessible via lithographic techniques or chemical treatment, but both methods are limited with respect to their ultimate resolution and precision. In this presentation, I will review our recent attempts to overcome these limitations by a bottom-up strategy allowing for the atomically precise fabrication of graphene-related materials 3-7 .