Uniform Colloidal Polymer Rods by Stabilizer‐Assisted Liquid‐Crystallization‐Driven Self‐Assembly

Abstract

The synthesis of anisotropic colloidal building blocks is essential for their self‐assembly into hierarchical materials. Here, a highly efficient stabilizer‐assisted liquid‐crystallization‐driven self‐assembly (SA‐LCDSA) strategy was developed to achieve monodisperse colloidal polymer rods. This strategy does not require the use of block copolymers, but only homopolymers or random copolymers. The resulting rods have tunable size and aspect ratios, as well as well‐defined columnar liquid crystal structures. The integrated triphenylene units enable the rods to exhibit unusual photo‐induced fluorescence enhancement and accompanying irradiation memory effect, which, as demonstrated, are attractive for information encryption/decryption of paper documents. In particular, unwanted document decryption during delivery can be examined by fluorescence kinetics. This SA‐LCDSA‐based approach can be extended to synthesize other functional particles with desired π‐molecular units.

Light‐Regulated Nucleation for Growing Highly Uniform Single‐Crystalline Microrods

“…Living self‐assembly has been an active area of supramolecular self‐assembly research, which has raised the precise control of nanostructures to unprecedented levels and made it possible to fabricate complex structures that had never been achieved before [1–12] . In order to achieve this self‐assembly control, several living self‐assembly methods have been developed.…”

Light‐Regulated Nucleation for Growing Highly Uniform Single‐Crystalline Microrods

“…Living self-assembly has been an active area of supramolecular self-assembly research, which has raised the precise control of nanostructures to unprecedented levels and made it possible to fabricate complex structures that had never been achieved before. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] In order to achieve this self-assembly control, several living self-assembly methods have been developed. These methods mainly include crystallization-driven living self-assembly of polymers [13][14][15][16] and kinetically trapping of small molecules in metastable aggregates or an inactive molecular states.…”