Self-Assembly of Facial Oligothiophene Amphiphiles

Organized ?-conjugated oligothiophene structures in water are highly promising building blocks to create a vast variety of smart and functional electronic systems. Such materials already found application in biological and chemical sensors, organic light-emitting diodes and photovoltaic devices. The high level of molecular order in such devices is crucial for their efficiency, but cannot be easily achieved by common lithography. Fortunately, nature developed a powerful tool to spontaneously organize isolated molecular components into ordered structures. Ubiquitous nano and micro architectures can be obtained by self-assembly. Hence, extending the design and knowledge of self-assembly to oligothiophenes in water opens doors to achieve new functional materials and devices. In this work the development of new and easily accessible self-assembling facial oligothiophene amphiphile systems is described. To arrive at a better understanding of the processes involved, we pioneered the use of the Martini coarse-grained molecular dynamic simulation model to investigate the self-assembly behavior of these systems