The recognition of quasicrystals, which exhibit long-range order but lack translational symmetry, represented both the introduction of a new class of materials and a transformative breakthrough in crystallography. Concomitant with the exploration of quasicrystallinity, metal–organic architectures emerged as promising and versatile systems with significant application potential. Their building principles have been studied extensively and become manifest in a multitude of intricate amorphous and crystalline phases. To date, however, indications for quasicrystalline order have been elusive in metal–organic coordination networks (MOCNs). Here we employ rare-earth-directed assembly to construct a two-dimensional tiling with quasicrystalline characteristics at a well-defined gold substrate. By careful stoichiometry control over europium centres and functional linkers, we produced a porous network, including the simultaneous expression of four-fold, five-fold and six-fold vertices. The pertaining features were directly inspected by scanning tunnelling microscopy, and the molecule–europium reticulation was recognized as square-triangle tessellation with dodecagonal symmetry. Our findings introduce quasicrystallinity in surface-confined MOCNs with a nanoporous structure and anticipate functionalities that arise from quasicrystalline ordering of the coordinative spheres.

Nature Chemistry (2016) doi:10.1038/nchem.2507
Received 31 July 2015 Accepted 15 March 2016 Published online 16 May 2016

http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2507.html