Rational Design of Smectic Liquid Crystals for Electro-Optical Applications

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Chirality is a property that man-made and almost all living things possess. Chiral objects exist in right- and left-handed forms (e.g., gloves, golf clubs) and are non-superposable on their mirror images. Chirality is also manifest at the molecular scale. (e.g., amino acids, carbohydrates); these chiral building blocks are assembled by nature to form larger chiral structures (e.g., proteins, nucleic acids), which themselves form crystalline structures with chiral topographies. This manifestation of molecular chirality at the macroscopic level, which was first recognized by Pasteur with crystals of sodium ammonium tartrate, is revealed in lamellar (smectic) liquid crystal phases by form chirality and spontaneous polarization. For example, the chiral smectic C (SmC*) phase is characterized by a helical structure in which the molecular tilt orientation precesses about the layer normal; it also exhibits a spontaneous polarization (