Farha, Hupp and the Northwestern team pushed experimental surface area to about 7,140 m2/g with NU-110E, a copper-paddlewheel framework strung on enormous hexacarboxylate linkers stiffened by alkyne spacers. More interesting than the record is the paper's engineering honesty about how such fragile emptiness is even measurable: conventional drying collapses these lattices, and only supercritical CO2 activation preserves the porosity the crystallography promises.
The question-mark title is answered with simulations. Computational analysis in the same paper indicates that fully exposing linker faces and edges could push hypothetical materials toward 14,600 m2/g, mapping the remaining headroom and, implicitly, its cost: materials so dilute they approach crystalline scaffolding around nothing. A gram of NU-110 occupies more volume than a golf ball; a fuel tank of it holds impressive gas per kilogram and mediocre gas per liter.
That volumetric critique is the honest heart of any review of this work. Gravimetric records reward low density twice, once in the numerator and once in the marketing, while applications from vehicular gas storage to fixed-bed capture are sized by volume. The authors knew this, the field knew this, and within a few years leaderboard papers gave way to trade-off analyses, which is the healthiest possible legacy.
A decade later the record still stands within experimental error of a few successors, suggesting the practical ceiling was indeed reached here. Few subfields get such a clean final chapter.