Amphiphilic porphyrin nanocrystals: Morphology tuning and hierarchical assembly

A study was conducted to demonstrate a hierarchical strategy for producing mesoscopic and larger objects from discrete amphiphilic porphyrins. The strategy manipulates growth of molecular nanocrystals in solution under energetic growth conditions and subsequently assembling them into larger structures using amphiphilic surfactant glue. The method is scalable and the crystal shape can be tuned with the vast store of synthetic porphyrins, offering a wide diversity of nanomaterials with potential applications in energy conversions, imaging, and catalysis. The plethora of functionalities accessible via synthetic chemistry, together with the ability to control nanocrystal growth followed by hierarchical assembly, also should make the strategy described here a fertile venue for fabricating multifunctional nano-, meso-, micro-, and macro-structures from molecular building blocks and investigating the applications of these novel nanomaterials in energy conversion, imaging, and catalysis.