Functional Discotic Liquid Crystals Through Molecular Self-Assembly: Toward Efficient Charge Transport Systems

In the area of developing organic semiconductor materials for reducing the demand for expensive, relatively toxic, and not easily processable inorganic materials, discotic liquid crystals (DLCs) exhibit a significant potential due to their extraordinary features. DLC systems are known to undergo self-organization into columnar stacks that act as one-dimensional molecular wires for charge transport. The self-healing nature of DLCs can remove various structural defects, such as grain boundaries, which are detrimental to charge transport. By thermal annealing, the spontaneous macroscopic alignment could be achieved that is highly beneficial to enhance the charge transport by several orders. Supplementary to these interesting features, DLCs consist of alkyl chains that make these materials solution-processable in addition to melt-processable. With these properties, this chapter illustrates various DLC-based charge transport systems that show these materials with the conjugated electron system offer the possibility for novel, flexible, low-cost, ubiquitous electronics.