The anisotropic ion conductivity and phase transition behaviours of ionic liquid crystalline samples confined in aluminum oxide membranes with cylindrical pores were demonstrated.

Against a sensible expectation that molecular mobility in fluids generally disrupts magnetic orderings that depend on intermolecular interactions, some molecular compounds with isolated electrons, which are called radicals, exhibit the increase of magnetic susceptibility in melting. Here we first propose a simple model to explain the thermomagnetic anomaly unique to fluids; the effect of the magnetic interactions in each of the contacts could be accumulated on each of the molecular spins as if the molecular motion amplified the first coordination number of each molecule hundredfold. The huge coordination number theoretically guarantees the retention of memory of interactions at equilibrium; molecules might be able to conserve the memory of molecular conformations, configurations, electric charges, energies as well as magnetic memory with each other.

We synthesized new chiral all-organic liquid crystalline (LC) compounds with nitroxide (NO) and hydroxy (OH) groups, which form intermolecular hydrogen bonds between the NO and OH groups. The LC compounds show hexagonal columnar phases at room temperature, which solidify as LC glasses at low temperature. The experimental magnetic susceptibility of each of the compounds in the LC and isotropic phases is larger than that theoretically estimated on the simple assumption about the amount of the spins, whereas it accords with the theoretical one in the LC glass state. It is called magneto-LC effects. The difference between experimental and theoretical magnetic susceptibilities gradually increases as temperature increases through the LC glass state-to-LC phase transition. It suggests that molecular mobility is one of the origins of the magneto-LC effects.

Cholesteric liquid crystalline (CLC) emulsions are the easiest 3D omnidirectional laser resonators to fabricate. To exploit the full potential of CLC emulsions as distributed Bragg reflection (DBR) mode laser resonators, monodispersed water‐in‐CLC‐in‐water double emulsions (CLC microcapsules) have higher performance scalability than simple CLC droplets. If laser dyes are concentrated at the center of CLC microcapsules, emitted light from the dye is 3D confined. When water is squeezed from the inner phase of a CLC microcapsule comprising an aqueous laser dye solution by means of osmotic pressure difference from the outer phase, the DBR lasing threshold of the CLC microcapsule is reduced. The shrinkage of the inner droplet contributes not only the simple reduction of the cavity length but also the suppression of the optical loss to reduce the lasing threshold. The reduced optical loss is beneficial to realize various devices: optical manipulation, photonic cross communications, and biochemical, light, and temperature sensing. Their flexible photonic structures are suitable for emerging and future optical devices like wearable optical devices.

A unique superparamagnetic‐like behavior and a large “positive magneto‐LC effect” were observed in the solid phases and the hexagonal columnar (Colh) liquid crystalline (LC) phase, respectively, of novel achiral non‐π‐delocalized nitroxide diradical compounds (R,S)‐1, which showed polymorphism in the solid phases (solids I and II). The SQUID magnetization measurement revealed that (1) (R,S)‐1 containing a small amount of racemic diastereomers (R*,R*)‐1 possessed an unusual and large temperature‐independent magnetic susceptibility (χTIM>0) component in the original nanocrystalline solid I that was responsible for the observed superparamagnetic‐like behavior under low magnetic fields and did not arise from the contamination by extrinsic magnetic metal or metal ion impurities, besides ordinary temperature‐dependent paramagnetic susceptibility (χpara>0) and temperature‐independent diamagnetic susceptibility (χdia<0) components, (2) a large increase in molar magnetic susceptibility (χM) (positive magneto‐LC effect) that occurred at the solid I‐to‐liquid crystal transition upon heating was preserved as an additional χTIM increase in the resulting polymorphic nanocrystalline solid II by cooling, and (3) such unique magnetic phenomena were induced by thermal processing for (R,S)‐1 or by adding a small amount of (R*,R*)‐1 to (R,S)‐1 as the impurity.