Highly oriented, domain-boundary-free organic thin films could find use in various high-performance organic materials and devices. However, even with state-of-the-art supramolecular chemistry, it is difficult to construct organic thin films with structural integrity in a size regime beyond the micrometer length scale. We show that a space-filling design, relying on the two-dimensional (2D) nested hexagonal packing of a particular type of triptycene, enables the formation of large-area molecular films with long-range 2D structural integrity up to the centimeter length scale by vacuum evaporation, spin-coating, and cooling from the isotropic liquid of the triptycene. X-ray diffraction analysis and microscopic observations reveal that triptycene molecules form a completely oriented 2D (hexagonal triptycene array) + 1D (layer stacking) structure, which is key for the long-range propagation of structural order.
We report a molecular adsorption effect on the first-order metal–insulator transition of vanadium dioxide (VO2) thin films. The phase transition temperature is shifted higher by the adsorption of particular polar and rigid tripodal molecules on the film surfaces. The shift becomes larger with increasing dipole moment magnitude, which ranges from 0 to 20 D. The orientation of polar molecules aligned on the surface is most likely responsible for the higher shift of the transition temperature. Coating the surfaces with polar molecules, as demonstrated in this work, might provide a unique way of controlling the phase transition of materials.
We show that incorporation of 5 wt% triptycene leads to an improvement in polymer crystallinity, power conversion efficiency (maximum: 9.4%), and long-term stability.
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