No abstract

Making molecular machines that can be useful in the macroscopic world is a challenging long-term goal of nanoscience. Inspired by the protein machinery found in biological systems, and based on the theoretical understanding of the physics of motion at the nanoscale, organic chemists have developed a number of molecules that can produce work by contraction or rotation when triggered by various external chemical or physical stimuli. In particular, basic molecular switches that commute between at least two thermodynamic minima and more advanced molecular motors that behave as dissipative units working far from equilibrium when fuelled with external energy have been reported. However, despite recent progress, the ultimate challenge of coordinating individual molecular motors in a continuous mechanical process that can have a measurable effect at the macroscale has remained elusive. Here, we show that by integrating light-driven unidirectional molecular rotors as reticulating units in a polymer gel, it is possible to amplify their individual motions to achieve macroscopic contraction of the material. Our system uses the incoming light to operate under far-from-equilibrium conditions, and the work produced by the motor in the photostationary state is used to twist the entangled polymer chains up to the collapse of the gel. Our design could be a starting point to integrate nanomotors in metastable materials to store energy and eventually to convert it.

Organic materials exhibiting metallic behavior are promising for numerous applications ranging from printed nanocircuits to large area electronics. However, the optimization of electronic conduction in organic metals such as charge-transfer salts or doped conjugated polymers requires high crystallinity, which is detrimental to their processability. To overcome this problem, the combination of the electronic properties of metal-like materials with the mechanical properties of soft self-assembled systems is attractive but necessitates the absence of structural defects in a regular lattice. Here we describe a one-dimensional supramolecular polymer in which photoinduced through-space charge-transfer complexes lead to highly coherent domains with delocalized electronic states displaying metallic behavior. We also reveal that diffusion of supramolecular polarons in the nanowires repairs structural defects thereby improving their conduction. The ability to access metallic properties from mendable self-assemblies extends the current understanding of both fields and opens a wide range of processing techniques for applications in organic electronics.