Porous inorganic materials are often made by using molecular templates that help to maintain internal channels during synthesis.The success with small molecules for creating microporous zeolites and related materials with angstrom-scale channels has been extended with molecular assemblies such as vesicles being used to create mesoporous materials with nanometer-scale channels. However, the walls of these materials are usually amorphous. Lin et al. (p. 811, published online 24 January) now report that crystalline mesoporous gallium zincophosphites can be made with very large channels (up to 72-membered rings spanning 3.5 nanometers) by using long-chain amine templates. The materials have limited thermal stability that hinders template removal, but when appropriately doped and loaded with chromophores, the materials exhibit broadband photoluminescence.
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