Yuudai Iwai

Breaking of inversion symmetry is a significant structural transition that gives rise to high-electrical and optical functionalities in solid-state materials. In general, it is difficult to intentionally break the inversion symmetry of structures by material synthesis. However, recent advances in host–guest chemistry dealing with molecular-based materials have demonstrated several methods for controlling the inversion symmetry of hosts by guests.

Giant anisotropic thermal expansion of copper-cyanido flat layers with flexible copper nodes† Flat layers are usually considered as structurally rigid motifs in two-dimensional (2D) materials. In this work, we demonstrate that a flat honeycomb-layer composed of distorted tri-coordinate copper ions bridged with cyanidos in (tetraethylammonium)Cu2(CN)3 exhibits high in-plane flexibility. This resulted in an extremely large anisotropic 2D-thermal expansion.