Patterning Composites Made of Rodlike and Bent-Core Molecules for Electric Applications

Soft materials are ideal candidates for creating tunable, self-assembled architectures. Composite materials are elaborately designed with an unusual physical performance that combines solid nanostructures and orientationally ordered soft matter. Such composites can not only inherit properties of their constituents but also exhibit excellent conductivity. Herein, we demonstrate a dewetting method to pattern binary mixtures composed of rod-like (R) 8OCB and bent-core (BC) OXD-7 molecules. By confining the R-BC composite in a geometric sandwich system with a surface-modified surface, we were able to generate R-BC microstripes that were not only nearly uniform in size but also highly ordered in alignment. It was found that these composite microstripes formed donor-acceptor systems that enhance the conductivity of the soft system while not altering the coexisting smectic phase of 8OCB and B₆ phase of OXD-7.