Functional Carbazole-Fullerene Complexes: A New Perspective of Carbazoles Acting as NanoOctopus to Capture Globular Fullerenes.

Fullerene host-guest constructs have attracted increasing attention owing to their molecular-level hybrid arrangements. However, the usage of simple carbazolic derivatives to bind with fullerenes is rare. In this research, we rationally designed three novel carbazolic derivatives containing a tunable bridging linker and carbazole units for the capturing of fullerenes. Unlike the general concave-convex interactions, fullerenes could interact with the planar carbazole subunits to form 2-dimensional hexagonal/quadrilateral cocrystals with alternating stacking patterns of 1:1 or 1:2 stoichiometry, as well as the controllable fullerene packing modes. At the meanwhile, good electron-transporting performances and significant photovoltaic effects were realized when continuous C 60 ···C 60 interaction channel existed. Our results indicate that the introduction of such carbazolic system into fullerene receptor would provide us new insights into novel fullerene host-guest architectures for versatile applications.