Structural investigation of zeolite-templated, ordered microporous carbon by scanning tunneling microscopy and raman spectroscopy

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and Raman spectroscopy have been employed for a detailed structural characterization of an ordered microporous carbon synthesized in the nanochannels of zeolite Y by a templating approach. The carbon exhibited an exceptionally high adsorption capacity together with a long-range structural organization on the nanometer scale. As revealed by STM, this material exhibited both terrace-like and periodic (∼1.4 nm) stripe-like nanostructures. The vertical separation between contiguous terraces was measured to be also about 1.4 nm and was thus coincident with the structural periodicity deduced by X-ray diffraction. The terraces of the carbon material were shown to consist of arrays of ∼1 nm wide carbon clusters. The carbon clusters displayed only a limited degree of local order within the terraces but not long-range periodicity. Likewise, STM indicated that the micropore structure of this carbon originated from the large number of voids that separate adjacent clusters, being morphologically very different from that commonly found in activated carbons. The range of void sizes measured by STM (0.8-2.3 nm) was in complete agreement with the pore size distribution determined from nitrogen adsorption measurements. The origin of the nanostructural features observed for this microporous carbon was discussed on the basis of the surface structure of the zeolite Y template. Finally, Raman spectroscopy provided evidence that the carbon clusters were made up of nanographenes with a curved topology.