New chiral liquid crystal with unconventional dioxane terminal unit

Abstract

While designing new chiral self-assembling materials, i.e. those possessing the liquid crystalline behaviour, special attention should be paid to the specific architecture of different molecular parts, in particular: molecular core, linkage groups, type and place of the lateral substituents, structure of the chiral centre and the chiral and non-chiral chains. For the first time a new chiral photosensitive liquid crystalline compound possessing an unconventional 1,3-dioxanylmethyl terminal unit attached to the non-chiral chain has been designed and synthesized. On cooling from the isotropic phase, the material possesses only one tilted liquid crystalline phase, namely the smectic I* phase with hexagonal ordering. The crystal phase has been detected at lower temperatures. The self-assembling and structural behaviour have been studied by different techniques and compared to that of the materials with similar molecular structure but possessing structurally different terminal units in the non-chiral chain.