Synthesis of a carbon nanobelt

Stitching a belt out of carbon rings If you had a molecular scalpel, you could slice a carbon nanotube twice against the long axis to excise a loop of fused phenyl rings. Of course, knives don't come that small. Instead, Povie et al. succeeded in stitching together such a nanometer-scale belt in bottom-up fashion from molecular components, using consecutive Wittig reactions (see the Perspective by Siegel). The belt of 12 edge-sharing rings could ultimately be a first step toward more precisely controlled bottom-up syntheses of extended nanotubes. Science , this issue p. 172 ; see also p. 135