Multifunctional Supramolecular Materials

The ability to create regularly shaped nanoscale objects which serve as the building blocks of supramolecular materials is an extremely important goal in materials science. Herein, we report on a general class of supramolecular materials created by self organizing triblock molecules that form nanostructures lacking a center of inversion. The supramolecular materials formed by these molecules have been characterized by a number of techniques including, transmission electron microscopy, second harmonic generation, small angle X-ray scattering, and photoluminescence. These supramolecular units organize spontaneously into films thousands of layers thick. Interestingly, second harmonic generation measurements demonstrate the stacking of nanostructures in the films is polar. The hierarchical organization of these objects could offer materials with defined nanopores, chemically and topographically defined surfaces, large arrays of quantum dots, as well as other interesting properties such as second order nonlinear optical response, piezoelectricity, pyroelectricity and strong luminescence.