Structure-Tunable Bidirectional Hybrid Nanowires via Multicompartment Cylinders

We present structure-tunable bidirectional inorganic-organic hybrid nanowires templated by soft multicompartment cylinders, possessing perfectly parallel compartments. The poly(2-vinylpyridine) compartments are used to bind nanoparticles via supramolecular coordination. The resulting hybrid nanowires are tunable in terms of the distribution of the inorganics in the corona. The two limiting cases are (a) perfectly aligned, parallel nanowires and (b) nanowires with one homogeneous corona. This approach demonstrates how advances in polymer architectures can be used to create novel hybrid materials of unprecedented complexity and very desirable architecture.