Fabrication of porous nanonetwork-structured carbons from well-defined cylindrical molecular bottlebrushes.

Well-defined cylindrical molecular bottlebrushes, prepared via atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), were employed as building blocks and transformed into new porous nanonetwork-structured carbons (PNSCs) via hypercrosslinking chemistry and shape-regulated carbonization. The as-prepared PNSCs exhibited a unique nanomorphology-tunable characteristic with simply varying carbonization conditions. Due to their three-dimensional network nanomorphologies with well-developed hierarchical porous structures and conductive carbon framework, the PNSCs demonstrated excellent electrochemical performances in lithium-sulfur batteries.