The design and study of lemniscular and helicene based molecules

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I will be applying organic synthetic techniques to forming novel molecules which have either a helical or figure-ofeightshape. These molecules are chiral and offer intriguing possibilities for the manipulation of bulk phases in thecontext of mirror image symmetry breaking. We will especially look to study self-assembly and their use as dopantsin liquid crystalline materials. Some intriguing possibilities are to develop these materials with a view to examining thepossibility of whether we can form exotic soft-matter topological quasiparticles.We will seek to characterise these materials with a range if imaging techniques including polarised opticalmicroscopy, confocal microscopy, electron microscopy and high-speed dynamical imaging.We envisage the reproducible formation of topological defects in small dimension droplets as having remarkableoptical properties with possible future directions in display and memory storage applications. We will work closelywith soft-matter modellers and work towards an understanding of how such complex knotted defects form in adynamical context. The topological defects we have started to examine have implications of self-assembledstructures from the small to the large scales, i.e. particle physics through to cosmology, and hence manageablescales, such as soft-matter chemistry offer an ideal opportunity to expand our knowledge across scales in thephysical sciences.