Nanotapes formed through the air/water interfacial self-assembly of a bola-form pentanediamide derivative

We herein have investigated the interfacial assembly behavior of a bola-form compound, N(1),N(5)-di(1-naphthyl)pentanediamide, which has two naphthyl head groups connected by a pentanediamide spacer, through the Langmuir and Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) strategy. The Langmuir and LB films of the compound have been characterized by π-A isotherm, atomic force microscopy (AFM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), UV–vis spectra, transmission electron microscope (TEM) and electron diffraction (ED). The results indicated that the compound could hierarchically self-organize to form nanotapes even at the very low surface pressure, which could then be assembled to form locally ordered aligned nanoarrays under a higher surface pressure. It was suggested that the intermolecular π–π interaction and hydrogen-bond were responsible for the formation of such nanotapes, and that the formation of the locally regular arranged nanotape arrays was owing to the so-called “logs-on-a-river” effect.