Liquid Crystals Templating

Nanostructure Templating in Inorganic Solids with Organic Lyotropic Liquid Crystals

Various nanoscale semiconducting superlattices have been generated by direct templating in a lyotropic organic liquid crystal. These include superlattices of CdS, CdSe, and ZnS, templated in a liquid crystal formed by oligoethylene oxide oleyl ether amphiphiles and water. The semiconductor growth process copied the symmetry and characteristic dimensions of the original mesophase by avoiding gro...

Crystal templating through liquid-liquid phase separation.

Controlled induction of crystal nucleation is a highly desirable but elusive goal. Attempts to speed up crystallization, such as high super saturation or working near a liquid-liquid critical point, always led to irregular and uncontrollable crystal growth. Here, we show that under highly nonequilibrium conditions of spinodal decomposition, water crystals grow as thin wires in a template-less f...

Nanofabrication of highly ordered, tunable metallic mesostructures via quasi-hard-templating of lyotropic liquid crystals

The synthesis of metal frameworks perforated with nanotunnels is a challenge because metals have high surface energies that favor low surface area structures; traditional liquid-crystal templating techniques cannot achieve the synthetic control required. We report a synthetic strategy to fabricate metal nanomaterials with highly ordered, tunable mesostructures in confined systems based on a new...

Photoalignment of liquid crystals by liquid crystals

We observed light-induced alignment of the nematic liquid crystal, 4, 4(')-n-pentylcyanobiphenyl (5CB), on a fused quartz. Irradiation of the adsorbed layer with polarized ultraviolet light produced homogeneous alignment in a 5CB-filled liquid crystal cell with the easy orientation axis perpendicular to the polarization direction. The measured anchoring energy increases with illumination up to ...

Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals