Feynman’s famous lecture in 1960 titled “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom” is still inspiring a multitude of scientists from a vast number of fields to think small. Materials, structures and devices fabricated at nanoscale dimensions have been identified as the basis for innumerable future technologies.

Among the many types of liquid crystals (LCs), planar disk-like molecules such as triphenylenes are known to exhibit columnar mesophases. An example of such compounds are 2,3,6,7,10,11-hexakis-alkoxy-substituted triphenylenes, hereafter noted Tn where n indicates the number of carbon atoms in the alkyl chains. Tn molecules consist in flat polyaromatic cores symmetrically surrounded by flexible n-carbon side chains (Figure 1).

The majority of electronic devices is designed on silicon wafers where the architecture of the different layers is made through lithographic techniques and resin masks. To cope with the desired increase in performance (Moore’s law), the structure size has to be reduced in order to integrate a larger number of components. Lithographic techniques then reach limits (pure top-down process).