Lamellar Assembly of Conical Molecules Possessing a Fullerene Apex in Crystals and Liquid Crystals

摘要

The supramolecular arrangement of molecules through nonco-valent interactions into ordered structures is among the central issues of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Fullerene-containing me-sogens thus attracted the interest of our group and others since they raise the hope that one can draw new properties out of such molecules and the resulting mesophases. However, covalent attachment of fullerene molecules to a mesomorphic promoter molecule such as cholesterols and dendrimers did not result in the desired properties in some cases, because the grafted fullerene groups tend to disturb the organization of the original mesogenic molecules. Sometime ago we used the [60]fullerene molecule itself as the central element of mesomorphysm5 and reported that shuttlecock-shaped molecules, C_(60)R_5H [R = C_6H_4-Ph-4 or C_6H_4-{OCO-C_6H_3-(OC_(12)H_(25))2-3,4}-4], stack together to form a polar columnar structure and that this new strategy can be expanded to the creation of silicon-and metal-containing redox-active liquid crystalline phases. We report herein that suitable modification of the C_(60)R_5 structure leads to the formation of layered lamellar structures in crystals and liquid crystals (Figure 1a,d).