Trapping of inorganic nanowires in supramolecular organic nanoribbons

Abstract

Self-assembly of semiconductor nanowires into three-dimensional network implicates a new era of nanoelectronics applications. We demonstrate the incorporation of cadmium sulphide (CdS) nanowires in the supramolecular order of discotic liquid crystal. This was studied by polarized optical microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, FE-SEM and EDAX. Results indicate that CdS nanowires were trapped in ribbon like structures of hexahexyloxy-triphenylene discotic liquid crystal. A 3–4 orders of magnitude increase in conductivity of the system was observed on doping CdS nanowires.