Recent progress in functional materials from lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals

Abstract

Research on lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals has grown tremendously from fundamental studies to designing functional materials for applications in biological fields and other technological areas. The majority of the research has centered on utilizing chromonic small molecules predominantly dissolved in aqueous solvents. But these often present processing difficulties and a host of other unattractive features including poor mechanical and chemical stabilities. Mesophase properties of chromonic liquid crystals as characterized using X-ray diffraction and scattering techniques, spectroscopy and light microscopy are explored. We review potential applications and future perspectives of this subfield where methods of transforming chromonic molecules into functional materials are highlighted.

Cholesteric mesophase based 1D photonic materials from self-assembly of liquid crystalline block and random terpolymers containing chromonic molecules

“…3) which reveals a characteristic chromonic face-to-face stacking corresponding to $0.34 nm. 32 Both random and block terpolymers show this peak conrming presence of p-p stacking in both cases. In contrast, previous studies involving LCBBC78 (block copolymers) and LCRBC (random copolymers) that do not contain chromonic molecules did not show corresponding to p-p stacked aromatic cores as expected.…”

Molecular Simulation Approaches to the Study of Thermotropic and Lyotropic Liquid Crystals

“…Chromonic mesogens have been seen in a variety of dye and drug molecules, which commonly exhibit these two structural motifs (discs and hydrophilic peripheral groups). Chromonics have recently found new potentials applications [98] in areas such as biosensors [99,100], in the fabrication of thin-film structures [101] and in controllable self-assembly of gold nanorods [102], and interest in chromonic has been extended to drug delivery systems and to new areas such as "living liquid crystals" [103]. Understanding chromonic self-assembly is important in all these areas.…”

Vibrational circular dichroism studies of exceptionally strong chirality inducers in liquid crystals

“…1 Although they are best known for their applications in liquid crystal displays, their use ranges from polarisers, reflectors and lasers to artificial muscles, bio-sensors and drug delivery agents. [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Beyond this wide range of applications, liquid crystal science had also contributed significantly to our understanding of how symmetry breaking can modify the physical behaviour of materials. A well-known phenomenon is the doping of a non-chiral LC with chiral molecules, which even at seemingly insignificantly low concentrations of the chiral compound can induce helical structuring of the LC.…”