Designing Principles, Synthesis, and Properties of Smectic<scp>C</scp>Host Materials for Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals

Hird, Michael

doi:10.1002/9783527671403.hlc132

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Compounds that exhibit SmC-N transitions are relatively uncommon, [34][35][36][37][38] yet are attractive targets that could potentially avoid buckling defects associated with layer-contraction of SmC LCs cooled from SmA phases, which are known to degrade the performance of ferroelectric liquid crystals. [39][40][41][42][43] Figure 2. Compounds prepared for this study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploiting molecular symmetry reduction to enrich liquid crystal phase diversity

Ester

Williams

2019

Liquid Crystals

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The strategic tuning of liquid crystalline phase behaviour by adjusting molecular symmetry was investigated. A family of sixteen symmetrical and unsymmetrical 2,6-di(4'-n-alkoxybenzoyloxy) naphthalene derivatives were prepared and their liquid crystal properties examined by differential scanning calorimetry, polarised optical microscopy, and x-ray diffraction. All mesogens formed nematic phases, with longer-chain analogues also exhibiting smectic C phases at lower temperatures. Melting temperatures of the compounds strongly depend on molecular symmetry, whereas clearing transitions are relatively insensitive to this effect. A detailed analysis indicates that the clearing point can be predicted based on the nature of the terminal alkyl chains, with only a secondary effect from molecular symmetry. Moreover, low symmetry molecules showed a greater tendency to form smectic C phases, which was ascribed to the selective depression of the melting point versus the SmC-N transition. This demonstrates that molecular symmetry-breaking is a valuable tool both for tuning liquid crystalline phase range and for increasing a material's polymorphism.

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