  By bridging graphene and benzene through a well-defined sequence of
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and their inherent shell structure, J. Phys.
Chem. C, 2018, 122, 17526, it is shown that graphene is actually a coherent
arrangement of interwoven benzene molecules, which are coordinated by
aromaticity, shell structure and topology, all interrelated. The exotic
properties of graphene are in fact macroscopic manifestations of aromaticity.
At the molecular level this is revealed as a dynamical flipping of the atomic
pz-orbitals belonging to different sublattices, leading to a dynamical
interchange between aromatic and non-aromatic rings, associated with frontier
occupied-unoccupied orbitals or valence-conduction bands interchange with
opposite parities, in full agreement with many-body and topological insulators
theory. Such dynamical interchange or coupling is driven by inversion
symmetry-breaking, activated through geometrical frustration between sublattice
and space group symmetry. This, for rectangular nanographenes, in contrast to
hexagonal, leads to topological gapless edge states, which, contrary to
opposite claims, are not spin polarized.
