A Comparison of Short-Range Molecular Order in Bent-Core and Rod-Like Nematic Liquid Crystals

Short-Range Smectic Order in Bent-Core Nematic Liquid Crystals

Small angle X-ray diffraction from the uniaxial nematic phase of certain bent-core liquid crystals is shown to be consistent with the presence of molecular clusters possessing short-range tilted smectic (smectic-C) order. Persistence of these clusters throughout the nematic phase, and even into the isotropic state, likely accounts for the unusual macroscopic behavior previously reported in bent...

Alignment by Langmuir/Schaefer Monolayers of Bent-Core Liquid Crystals

Langmuir films of bent-core molecules at the air/water interface are transferred onto a solid surface by the inverse-Langmuir-Schaefer (ILS) technique. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that ILS films of a symmetric bent-core molecule can serve as effective planar alignment layers for a nematic bent-core liquid crystal cell, but the Langmuir films were unstable and formed multilayers at...

Hybrid Rod-Like and Bent-Core Liquid Crystal Dimers Exhibiting Biaxial Smectic a and Nematic Phases

Chiral symmetry breaking in bent-core liquid crystals.

By molecular modeling we demonstrate that the nematic long-range order discovered in bent-core liquid-crystal systems should reveal further spatially homogeneous phases. Two of them are identified as a tetrahedratic nematic (N_{T}) phase with D_{2d} symmetry and a chiral tetrahedratic nematic (N_{T};{ *}) phase with D2 symmetry. These phases were found for a lattice model with quadrupolar and o...

Critical behavior at the isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in a bent-core liquid crystal.

Magnetic birefringence and dynamic light scattering measurements of orientational order parameter fluctuations at the isotropic-nematic phase transition of a bent-core liquid crystal reveal a pretransitional temperature dependence consistent with the standard Landau-deGennes mean field theory. However, as follows: the transition in the bent-core compound is more weakly first order (TNI-T* appro...