A novel supramolecular self-assembly thin film with spontaneous polar order

Macroscopic Order and Electro‐Optic Response of Dipolar Chromophore–Polymer Materials

“…[22][23][24][25][26] More generally, and often most efficiently, the microscopic molecular NLO elements are designed to possess large dipole moments that are ordered by an external field. [27][28][29][30][31][32][33] The current Minireview follows our earlier work [19,[34][35][36][37] and, using the existing theories of dipolar ordering, describes the key factors that determine the efficiency of poling in the formation of macroscopic polarization in NLO materials.…”

Expression of chirality in molecular layers at surfaces: insights from modelling

“…Roberto Lazzaroni enantioselective catalysis (the specific formation of one enantiomer), 3 chiral sensing (the specific detection of one enantiomer), 4 enantiomer resolution (the separation of enantiomers) 5 and non-linear optical materials (as the even-order non-linear optical responses require a noncentrosymmetric medium). 6 Nevertheless, research on chiral surfaces has developed only recently, mostly because of the difficulty in probing chirality at a surface. With the advent of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM), which opened the possibility of investigating surfaces with atomic-scale resolution, the direct observation of chiral patterns of adsorbed molecules became possible and many important results were obtained for a large variety of molecular adsorbates on very diverse surfaces (for reviews, see ref.…”

Piezoelectricity in Polar Supramolecular Materials

“…The anticipation that such structures might be used to construct molecular devices has been augmented by many examples of complex supramolecular architectures, such as discrete and infinite helices, hydrogenbonded or p-p interacting networks, three-dimensional assemblies with defined channels, cucurbituril and similar molecules, highly symmetric coordination clusters, and organometallic polymers. [2] Increasing the extent of molecular ordering, however, to form organized macroscopic structures has proven difficult. Two important examples include silver complexes, constructed from polycatenar scaffolds, forming columnar liquid-crystalline mesophases, [3] and the description of the macroscopic ordering of a metallo-helicate (B).…”

“…Designing for polar order in organic systems has long been a goal in materials chemistry because of its implications in surface properties, nonlinear optics, piezo-, ferro-, and pyroelectricity. The approaches to polar organic materials include the poling of host ± guest systems [1] self-assembled host ± guest systems, [2] the poling of polymer films, [3] Langmuir ± Blodgett film multilayers, [4±6] grafted polymer brushes, [7] multilayer growth, [8] or the spontaneous assembly of triblock rodcoil molecules into polar supramolecular films [9] discovered in our laboratory.This spontaneous polar self-assembly provides potentially a direct pathway to the creation of polar domains with a minimum number of processing steps. [9] These hierarchical structures begin with the aggregation of rodcoil molecules into a mushroom-shaped nanostructure lacking a center of inversion.…”