A dendron of subphthalocyanine trefoil

The synthesis of a dendron composed of tetrameric subphthalocyanine (SubPc) is accomplished by substituting the chlorine groups with phenoxy groups at the axial positions of SubPc with SubPc-triol. The present molecular design of the SubPc-triol introduces three phenol groups at the peripheral positions of the SubPc macrocycle as a tritopic template to construct SubPc dendrons. The self-polycondensation of SubPc-triol as a ‘divergent’ synthesis only gave a trace amount of the hyperbranched arrays due to poor solubility of the SubPc-triol. In contrast, a ‘convergent’ synthesis with the terminal SubPc improved the solubility throughout the reaction and a tetrameric SubPc dendron was obtained in moderate isolated yield.