Fabrication of large-area planar alignment of organic supramolecular nanostructures by directed self-assembly and its applications

Abstract

Soft materials such as block copolymers, colloids, liquid crystals, and supramolecules has been considered to be an important issues in the materials science and nanotechnology, because it is a simple, cost-effective process for fabricating high-resolution and highly periodic nanostructures. Especially, supramolecular materials are the promising nanomaterials to create highly periodic nanostructures due to advantageous properties such as small feature size (2 - 10 nm), versatile chemical functionalities, and rapid self-organizing time (~ few minutes). However, supramolecular structures generally have random orientation with structural defects, so thus precise orientation control has to be preceded for the practical bottom-up approaches. In this dissertation, directed self-assembly (DSA) of supramolecular structures are demonstrated for generating highly aligned nanostructures over a large-area. Supramolecular columns with small diameter size (d ~ 4.75 nm) exhibit planar alignment by utilizing graphoepitaxial method, laser writing, and faceted surfaces. This study is expected to open avenues for the production of a large family of supramolecular structures with different phases and dimensions. In addition, the design of new routes for creating highly periodic nanostructures based on supramolecules can be served.