Self-assembling of molecular nanowires for enhancing the conducting properties of discotic liquid crystals

The self-organization of discotic liquid crystal molecules in columns has enormous interest for soft nanoelectronic applications. A great advantage of discotic liquid crystal is that defects can be self-annealed in contrast to typical organic materials. Through the overlap of molecular orbitals, the aromatic cores assemble into long range ordered one-dimensional structures. Very thin structured films can be obtained by spin-coating from solution and the resulting morphologies are strongly dependent on the interaction between discotics and solvent molecules. Toluene produces films formed by very long nanowires, spontaneously aligned along a common direction and over fairly large areas. These nanostructured films are a result of the interplay between liquid crystal self-organization and solvent driven assembly. The ordered nanowire structures exhibit improvement in the electrical properties compared to misaligned structures and even to pristine HAT5, deposited without the aid of solvent. In this study we show that the toluene-based deposition of discotic liquid crystals is advantageous because it allows a uniform coverage of the substrate, unlike pristine HAT5 but also thanks to the type of induced structures exhibiting one order of magnitude higher conductivity, in the aligned nanowire films, compared to bare HAT5 ones.