Organic semiconductors may provide display unusual properties when they become confined to the nanometer length scale in one or two dimensions. We prepared well-defined supramolecular polymers from oligopeptide-substituted chromophore. The supramolecular helicity of these systems resulted in strict confinement to a single, helically twisted stack of the chromophores stacked along the supramolecular polymer.1 Synergistic hydrogen-bonding of the oligopeptide substituents and π–π stacking of the cores resulted in a strong electronic coupling of the chromophores,2 resulting in an unusual photogeneration of either positive or negative polaron charge carriers in the p-type or n-type nanowires without the addition of any redox-active reagent in either case. The charge carriers were formed reversibly, exhibited life times on the order of many hours, were therefore formed at unprecedented charge densities approaching the insulator-metal boundary, end exhibited unusually low activation energies for charge transport. The supramolecular polymers showed macroscopic hole or electron or transport properties, respectively, rendering the n-type systems the first examples of intrinsic electron-conducting organic semiconductor nanostructures. The described systems hence highlight the role of nanoscopic confinement on charge transport phenomena in organic semiconductors, and may be model systems to study spin effects in confined geometries. (1) Marty, R.; Szilluweit, R.; Sánchez-Ferrer, A.; Bolisetty, S.; Adamcik, J.; Mezzenga, R.; Spitzner, E.-C.; Feifer, M.; Steinmann, S. N.; Corminboeuf, C.; Frauenrath, H. ACS Nano 2013, 7, 8498. (2) Marty, R.; Nigon, R.; Leite, D.; Frauenrath, H. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136, 3919.

Unusual photocharge generation in 1D confined organic semiconductor nanostructures

251st National Meeting (2016)

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