Supramolecular electronics

Supramolecular electronics is the experimental field of supramolecular chemistry that bridges the gap between molecular electronics and bulk plastics in the construction of electronic circuitry at the nanoscale.^[1] In supramolecular electronics, assemblies of pi-conjugated systems on the 5 to 100 nanometer scale are prepared by molecular self-assembly with the aim to fit these structures between electrodes. With single molecules as researched in molecular electronics at the 5 nanometer scale this would be impractical.^[why?] Nanofibers can be prepared from polymers such as polyaniline and polyacetylene.^[2] Chiral oligo(p-phenylenevinylene)s self-assemble in a controlled fashion into (helical) wires.^[3] An example of actively researched compounds in this field are certain coronenes.

Crystal structure of a hexa-tert-butyl-hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene reported by Müllen and coworkers in Chem. Eur. J., 2000, pp. 1834–1839