Mechanically Induced Shaping of Organic Single Crystals: Facile Fabrication of Fluorescent and Elastic Crystal Fibers.

Mechanically induced shaping (i.e., top-down processing) of organic single crystals is an undeveloped area of research because applying stress to such nonflexible crystalline materials generally causes them to disintegrate. Herein, we present a mechanically induced splitting phenomenon of elastic organic single crystals, and study on a facile shaping processing method of centimeter-scale elastic organic single crystal of fluorescent π-conjugated molecule into various fine crystal fibers (thickness: ≈50 μm; width: ≈150 μm; length: ≈25 mm). The fibers produced maintained their original crystal structure and properties (i.e., fluorescence efficiency and elastic flexibility).