Electron Transport and Electrochemistry of Mesomorphic Fullerenes with Long-Range Ordered Lamellae

摘要

One of the great challenges in organic-based materials science is the creation of soft materials such as supramolecular materials and mesomorphic materials with tunable morphologies of the molecular organization and properties. Wet-chemical approaches for thin-film (TFT) and field-effect transistors (FET) using mesomorphic materials like liquid crystalline organic semiconductors are examples for practical devices, since organic single crystals are usually impractical. The basic requirements to achieve high carrier mobilities in liquid crystals involve close molecular packing, highly ordered structures, and extended π-conjugation leading to semiconductor features. Fullerene C_(60) is one kind of promising electron-transport material as an n-type semiconductor exhibiting relatively high carrier mobility of approximately 1.0 cm~2 V~(-1) s~(-1) in the single crystal and polycrystalline thin films. Although various morphologies of C6o-containing liquid crystals such as nematic, smectic, and columnar phases have been studied in the past decade, to the best of our knowledge, the carrier mobility of fullerenes in the liquid crystalline state has not been evaluated so far.