Cover Picture: Nanostructuring with a Crosslinkable Discotic Material (Small 8/2007)

From Well-Defined Carbon-Rich Precursors to Monodisperse Carbon Particles with Hierarchic Structures

The creation of nanoscale particles with well-defined structures has long been considered as a promising approach to generate materials with novel properties. Carbonaceous nanoparticles (CNPs) with defined architectures, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), C60, carbon onions, carbon spheres, and carbon rods are particularly attractive owing to their unique electronic properties and many potential applications. At the same time, when these CNPs are regularly organized, additional functions appear. Such materials are believed to have hierarchic structures, in which the organization of the CNPs forms the first-order structure (FOS) and the configuration of the single CNP forms the secondor higher…

Nanostructuring with a crosslinkable discotic material.

A high-yielding synthesis afforded a hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene carrying acrylate units at the end of six attached alkyl spacers. The polymerization of these acrylate moieties could be initiated with thermal energy and through direct photoactivation without the addition of a photoinitiator. This allowed the organization of the liquid-crystalline material to be fixed in either the crystalline state or the mesophase, which preserved the organization in the respective phase. The use of a focused synchrotron beam permitted selected regions of a thin film to be rendered insoluble. After "developing" the film in this lithographic process by dissolving the soluble, unpolymerized material, defined…