Supramolecular electronics

Crystal structure of a hexa-tert-butyl-hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene reported by Müllen and cooworkers in Chem. Eur. J., 2000, 1834-1839.

Supramolecular electronics is the experimental field of supramolecular chemistry that bridges the gap between molecular electronics and bulk plastics in the construction of electronic circuitry at the nanoscale ¹. In supramolecular electronics, assemblies of pi-conjugated systems on the 5 to 100 nanometer length scale are prepared by molecular self-assembly with the aim to fit these structures between electrodes. With single-molecules as researched in molecular electronics at the 5 nanometer scale this would be impractical. Nanofibers can be prepared from polymers such as polyaniline and polyacetylene ¹². Chiral oligo(p-phenylenevinylene)s self-assemble in a controlled fashion into (helical) wires ³. An example of actively researched compounds in this field are certain coronenes.

References

• ¹ Chemistry: Material marriage in electronics E. W. Meijer, Albert P. H. J. Schenning Nature 419, 353-354 (26 Sep 2002)
• ² Supramolecular electronics; nanowires from self-assembled -conjugated systems A. P. H. J. Schenning and E. W. Meijer Chemical Communications, 2005, (26), 3245 - 3258 Abstract
• ³ Towards supramolecular electronics A.P.H.J. Schenning et al. Synthetic Metals 147 (2004) 43–48 Article