Supermolecular Liquid Crystals with a Six-Armed Cyclotriphosphazene Core: From Columnar to Cubic Phases

Probing Columnar Discotic Liquid Crystals by EPR Spectroscopy with a Rigid-Core Nitroxide Spin Probe**

Within the last decade columnar discotic liquid crystals (DLCs) have attracted considerable interest, not least for their potential technological applications as one-dimensional conductors, in sensors, field-effect transistors, and photovoltaic solar cells. The coupling within stacked polyaromatic cores provides an efficient structure for charge transport along the columns thus providing one-di...

The Nematic Phases of Bent-Core Liquid Crystals

Over the last ten years, the nematic phases of liquid crystals formed from bent-core structures have provoked considerable research because of their remarkable properties. This Minireview summarises some recent measurements of the physical properties of these systems, as well as describing some new data. We concentrate on oxadiazole-based materials as exemplars of this class of nematogens, but ...

Thermal phase diagram of a model Hamiltonian for columnar phases of liquid crystals.

We present the phase diagram and critical properties of a coupled XY Ising model on a triangular lattice using the mean-field approximation, the Migdal-Kadanoff scheme of renormalization group and Monte-Carlo simulations. The topology of the phase diagram is similar for the three techniques, with the appearance of a phase with XY order and Ising disorder. The results suggest a line of transitio...

Liquid-crystalline fullerodendrimers which display columnar phases.

[structure: see text] The title compounds were synthesized by applying the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reaction of aldehyde-based poly(benzyl ether) dendrimers and sarcosine (N-methylglycine) to [60]fullerene (C(60)). The dendritic building blocks used to functionalize C(60) displayed cubic and hexagonal columnar phases. The fullerene derivatives showed rectangular columnar phases of c2mm symmetry.

Dielectric Investigations on Ferroelectric Columnar Liquid Crystals