Abstract
Organic conducting materials exhibit promising functionalities, inducing hence a keen interest due to their potential use as a next generation photoconverters. However, unlike the more expensive inorganic analogues, the underlying properties that give rise to these advantages also cause organic materials to be inherently inefficient as photovoltaics. Understanding their properties at the microscopic level is a major step towards an efficient and targeted design. We probed the morphological and dynamical aspects of a model organic discotic liquid crystal material hexakis(n-hexyloxy)triphenylene (HAT6) by using neutron-based diffraction and quasielastic scattering techniques to gain deeper insights into structure and dynamics. The neutron measurements are accompanied, in a synergistic way, by molecular dynamics simulations for the sake of the analysis and interpretation of the observations
Highlights
Due to their potential applications as photovoltaic energy-converters and thanks to their low cost, inherent flexibility and relative ease of processing, organic conducting materials offer a better alternative to the traditional, cost-prohibitive, inorganic semiconductors [1, 2, 3]
The molecular-dynamics simulation (MD) simulations were performed on different initial model structures, which were built from a hexagonal superlattice of 12 columns each consisting of six molecules (Figure 1(c))
Three regions are distinguishable in the neutron diffraction pattern of a discotic liquid crystals (DLCs) in the columnar phase (Figure 2): (i) a region with three sharp peaks originating from the two-dimensional hexagonal lattice, (ii) the broad distribution of the tail-tail distances form an intermediate region originating, and (iii) a region indicating the intra-columnar distances
Summary
Due to their potential applications as photovoltaic energy-converters and thanks to their low cost, inherent flexibility and relative ease of processing, organic conducting materials offer a better alternative to the traditional, cost-prohibitive, inorganic semiconductors [1, 2, 3]. We have studided various aspects (morphological/structural, dynamical, and electronic) of a model organic discotic liquid crystal material consisting of the molecular system hexakis(nhexyloxy)triphenylene (HAT6) [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. Neutron scattering measurements were performed, in the electronic ground state, to gain a deeper and better understanding of the structural and dynamical properties of this material.
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