Self-assembly of cardanol based supramolecular synthons to photoresponsive nanospheres: light induced size variation at the nanoscale

Abstract

The development of soft nanomaterials by the controlled self-assembly of molecules derived from renewable sources has become a major area of interest for scientists across the world. Our attempt in this paper is to report the self-assembly of a cardanol based photoswitchable molecule in non polar solvents such as cyclohexane. The self-assembly of molecule 1 leads to the formation of nanospheres and it is transformed under UV light. This could be seen as an example of light induced size variation at the nanoscale.