Our Mission Statement

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Our Vision

As a leading entrepreneurial university, we are a site of global knowledge exchange, shaping a sustainable future through talent, excellence and responsibility.

Our Mission

We inspire, promote and develop talents in all their diversity to become responsible, broad-minded individuals. We empower them to shape the progress of innovation for people, nature, and society with scientific excellence and technological expertise, with entrepreneurial courage and sensitivity to social and political issues, as well as a lifelong commitment to learning.

Our Core Values

Our core values form the foundation of our relationships with one another and with our cooperation partners:

  • Excellence: We cultivate an environment of curiosity, creativity and unconventional thinking across the disciplines and set the highest standards of performance in research, teaching, and innovation.
  • Entrepreneurial Mindset: We question the consequences of our actions, take on new challenges proactively, and continually enhance our working methods. We commit ourselves to socially reflected innovations and promote their commercial application by founding sustainable technology spin-offs.
  • Integrity: We draw our success from an inclusive community of talents from different backgrounds, cultures, ideas and perspectives. We act with respect for others and transparency in accordance with our shared values.
  • Collegiality: We respect and inspire one another in a vibrant culture of university community. We cultivate the academic, economic and social partnerships that make TUM a site of global knowledge exchange.
  • Sustainability and Resilience: We learn from our diverse experiences and see in persistent change the opportunity for the sustainable development of science, ecology, economy and society – from this we draw inspiration, motivation and resolve.

Our Guiding Principles

Governing Documents

An overview of central codes and regulations by which we shape research and innovation, teaching, and our governance as a top and modern university of international standing.

Governing Documents

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The TUM Compliance Office ensures the integrity and transparency of research, teaching and innovation based on the TUM Code of Conduct, the TUM Respect Guide, and the Statute on Safeguarding Good Academic Practice.

TUM Compliance Office

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News

  • 1/23/2018

Simple organic molecules form complex materials through self-organization

Complex tessellations, extraordinary materials

An international team of researchers lead by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has discovered a reaction path that produces exotic layers with semiregular structures. These kinds of materials are interesting because they frequently possess extraordinary properties. In the process, simple organic molecules are converted to larger units which form the complex, semiregular patterns.

The new process produces a complex semiregular 3.4.6.4 tessellation from simple organic molecules. (Image: Klappenberger and Zhang / TUM)
The new process produces a complex semiregular 3.4.6.4 tessellation from simple organic molecules. (Image: Klappenberger and Zhang / TUM)

Only a few basic geometric shapes lend themselves to covering a surface without overlaps or gaps using uniformly shaped tiles: triangles, rectangles and hexagons. Considerably more and significantly more complex regular patterns are possible with two or more tile shapes. These are so-called Archimedean tessellations or tilings.

Materials can also exhibit tiling characteristics. These structures are often associated with very special properties, for example unusual electrical conductivity, special light reflectivity or extreme mechanical strength. But, producing such materials is difficult. It requires large molecular building blocks that are not compatible with traditional manufacturing processes.

Complex tessellations through self-organization

An international team led by Professors Florian Klappenberger and Johannes Barth at the Chair of Experimental Physics of TUM, as well as Professor Mario Ruben at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, have now made a breakthrough in a class of supramolecular networks: They got organic molecules to combine into larger building blocks with a complex tiling formed in a self-organized manner.

As a starting compound, they used ethynyl iodophenanthrene, an easy to handle organic molecule comprising three coupled carbon rings with an iodine and an alkyne end. On a silver substrate, this molecule forms a regular network with large hexagonal meshes.

Heat treatment then sets a series of chemical processes in motion, producing a novel, significantly larger building block which then forms a complex layer with small hexagonal, rectangular and triangular pores virtually automatically and self-organized. In the language of geometry this pattern is referred to as a semiregular 3.4.6.4 tessellation.

Atom economy through by-product recycling

“The scanning tunnel microscopy measurements we conducted at TUM show clearly that the molecular reorganization involves many reactions that would normally result in numerous by-products. In this case, however, the by-products are recycled, meaning that the overall process runs with great economy of atoms – nearly one hundred percent recovery – to arrive at the desired end-product,” explains Prof. Klappenberger.

The researchers uncovered precisely how this happens in further experiments. “Using X-ray spectroscopy measurements at the electron storage ring BESSY II of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, we were able to decipher how iodine splits from the starting product, hydrogen atoms move to new positions and the alkyne groups capture the silver atom,” explains lead author Yi-Qi Zhang.

By way of the silver atom, two starting building blocks bind together to a new, larger building block. These new building blocks then form the observed complex pore structure.

“We have discovered a completely new approach to produce complex materials from simple organic building blocks,” summarizes Klappenberger. “This is important for the ability to synthesize materials with specific novel and extreme characteristics. These results also contribute to better understanding the spontaneous appearance (emergence) of complexity in chemical and biological systems.”

The research was funded by the German Research Foundation (in the context of the Excellence Cluster Munich Center for Advanced Photonics, as well as the priority program SPP 1459, the Transregio TR 88 3MET C5 and the DFG project KL 2294/3) and the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant MolArt). Synthesis and characterization of the molecules was done in the Karlsruhe Nano Micro Facility.

Publication:

Yi-Qi Zhang, Mateusz Paszkiewicz, Ping Du, Liding Zhang, Tao Lin, Zhi Chen, Svetlana Klyatskaya, Mario Ruben, Ari P. Seitsonen, Johannes V. Barth, and Florian Klappenberger:Complex supramolecular interfacial tessellation through convergent multistep reaction of a dissymmetric simple organic precursor,Nature Chemistry 2017. DOI: 10.1038/nchem.2924

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Florian Klappenberger
Technical University of Munich
Professorship of Experimental Physics
James-Franck-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
Tel.: +49 89 289 12616 – E-Mail: florian.klappenberger@tum.de

Technical University of Munich

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