Construction of Fiber-Like-Conjugated Hybrid Nanostructures of Controlled Length and Composition

π-Conjugated polymers have gained extensive attention due to potential applications in electroluminescent materials, field effect transistor, etc. The precise preparation of fiber-like π-conjugated fiber-like hybrid nanostructures of controlled length and composition has always been one of the research directions to improve the performance of materials, and still remains a challenge. Recently, Prof. Huang and Prof. Feng’s group from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, demonstrated an efficient and versatile platform for the construction of oligo(p-phenylenevinylene)(OPV)-based multi-component and multi-function fiber-like hybrid nanostructures by the combination of non-covalent interaction and “living” crystallization-driven self-assembly (CDSA). Through self-seeding and seeded growth approaches, uniform continuous micelles and segmented A-B-A, B-A-B-A-B multiblock fiber-like comicelles were able to be generated with tunable lengths for each block. By taking advantage of pyridyls of poly(2-vinylpyridine) (P2VP)-forming coronas, P2VP domains in these micelles or comicelles could be functionalized with diverse inorganic(CdTe, Au, Ag and Fe₃O₄) and polymeric nanoparticles as well as metal oxide coatings (SiO₂ and TiO₂) to afford hierarchical hybrid nanostructures. This work provides a versatile strategy toward the fabrication of multi-component, multi-function π-conjugated fiber-like nanostructures with the capacity to be selectively functionalized.