General Strategy to Synthesize Star-Shaped Nanographenes with Controllable Symmetries.

Nanographenes with diverse topological structures have shown enormous potential in fields such as photonics, optoelectronics, and spintronics. This work employs a "from-core-to-branch" strategy to controllably synthesize star-shaped nanographenes with various symmmetries. The obtained star-shaped nanographenes exhibit symmetry-dependent HOMO-LUMO gaps and photoluminescence quantum yields, revealing the importance of precisely controlling the molecular topologies. This work opens a new avenue to expand the chemical space of star-shaped nanographenes with tunable properties.