Bottom-up approaches towards functional fullerene-containing nanostructured materials

Fullerenes can play an important role in functional materials, the most common being that of an electron acceptor and electron transport material. Functional feasibility of fullerene derivatives has been shown in photovoltaic, photo detection, and image scanning devices, for example. In these applications, the fullerene acts together with a donor component. An efficient photovoltaic active layer made of molecular electron donor and acceptor moieties is especially demanding with respect to the morphology formed by the two electronic counterparts. An overview is given on the synthetic strategies towards molecular donor-fullerene architectures that have been used up to now in trying to obtain desired morphologies of fullerene-containing functional materials.