A supramolecular concept for stabilization of liquid crystalline blue phases – A first step towards 3D-photonic sensors

在过去的几十年里，液晶蓝相吸引了巨大的科学和商业关注。这些特殊类型的手性中间相在液晶显示和软光子学方面具有巨大的应用潜力。然而，这些材料的使用仍然受到限制，因为通常观察到蓝相的温度范围很小，并且缺少对结构-性能关系的全面理解。该研究项目旨在通过采用模块化方法来研究具有液晶蓝相的氢键组装来填补这一空白。所利用的方法提供了一个简单的合成访问过多的新的液晶，并在同一时间允许系统的结构-性能关系的研究，由于系统的良好的可比性。特别是，非共价相互作用在手性向中间相转移和蓝相稳定中的作用将是本项目的重点。此外，超分子组装体的结构和图案的影响将被调查（阶段1）。这些结构-性质关系研究的结果将为第一次证明的主要研究奠定基础，这些研究将应用于光可调光子反射器和光子传感器领域（第2阶段）。因此，分析物可能干扰三维光子结构的氢键或与基于芪的侧链反应（例如，添加氯或臭氧）。在未来，这种材料可能会被测试用于构建染料掺杂的液晶激光器。

Within the past decades, liquid crystalline blue phases have attracted tremendous scientific and commercial attention. These special types of chiral mesophases bear great application potential in liquid crystal displays and soft photonics. The use of these materials, however, remains limited due to the small temperature range in which blue phases are usually observed and a comprehensive understanding of structure-property relationships is missing. The research project aims to fill this gap by employing a modular approach for the investigation of hydrogen-bonded assemblies with liquid crystalline blue phases. The utilized method provides a simple synthetic access to a plethora of new liquid crystals and at the same time allows for systematic structure-property relationship studies due to the excellent comparability of the systems. Especially, the role of non-covalent interactions in the transfer of chirality into the mesophase and the stabilization of blue phases will be focus of the present project. In addition, the influence of the architecture of the supramolecular assemblies and the fluorination pattern will be investigated (phase 1). The results of these structure-property relationship studies will create the basis for first proof-of-principal studies towards application in the field of photo-tunable photonic reflectors and photonic sensors (phase 2). Thereby, the analyte might interfere with the hydrogen-bonds of the 3-dimensional photonic structure or react with the stilbazole based side chains (e.g. addition of chlorine or ozone). In the future the materials might be tested for the construction of dye-doped liquid crystal LASERs.