Highly Stable Vapor-Deposited Glasses of Four Tris-naphthylbenzene Isomers

Recent reports have shown that physical vapor deposition can prepare organic glasses with remarkably high kinetic stability and low enthalpy in comparison with ordinary glasses formed by cooling the supercooled liquid. We have prepared vapor-deposited glasses of four isomers of tris-naphthylbenzene (TNB) and characterized them using differential scanning calorimetry. We find that highly stable glasses can be prepared from all four isomers of TNB by vapor deposition at 0.85 T-g. Glasses with low enthalpy were prepared for at least three of the four isomers. Because the TNB family of isomers contains both good and poor glass-formers, these results indicate a new dimension to the generality of stable organic glass formation via physical vapor deposition.