Hierarchically organized soft-materials based on fullerenes

Simple chemical modifications of fullerene (C60) with long aliphatic chains provide novel type amphiphilic molecules playing in organic solvents due to the two different intermolecular interactions, namely π-π on C60 and van der Waals interactions on aliphatic chain moieties, respectively, and open a door developing supramolecular soft-materials having hierarchically organized architectures, various morphologies and functions based on fullerenes. By tuning the length and number of aliphatic chains on the derivatives as well as experimental conditions such as solvents, temperature, substrates for preparation of the assemblies, the assembled fullerenes showed various faces such as creating of many unique-shaped objects with controlled their dimensionality. For instance, nanowires and thin disks with single bilayer thickness in nanometer size, globular, fibrous, conical objects in mesoscopic (sub-micrometer) scale and flower-shaped and direction-controlled spiral objects in micrometer scale are obtained. As bulk states, thermotropic liquid crystals and room temperature (isotropic) liquid fullerenes are interestingly prepared from this molecular designs and showed not only their fluid natures and comparably high carrier mobility as fullerene-based organic-semiconductor phenomena. In addition, nano-carbon superhydrophobic surface with fractal morphology of the two-tier roughness on a nano- and microscopic scale was created from one of the supramolecular objects. The all of hierarchical supramolecular assemblies describing in this review is derived from fine-tuning intermolecular interactions of fullerene derivatives bearing long aliphatic chains.