Structure and optical properties of twist-bend nematic liquid crystals doped with chiral dopants.

Abstract

Twist-bend nematic liquid crystals (N_{TB} LCs), although consisting of achiral molecules, possess a spontaneous conic helix. They have been intensively studied and utilized in many applications in recent years. Herein we add chiral molecules to N_{TB} LCs and study their effects on the structure of the conic helix. We observe that the system is in the regular chiral nematic phase at high temperature and is still in the twist-bend nematic phase at low temperature. The addition of the chiral molecules does not induce a twist of the conic helical axis. The main effect of the chiral molecules is increasing the cone angle of the conic helix. We show that the structural chirality parameters in the chiral nematic phase and the twist-bend chiral nematic phase can be calculated from the same intrinsic chirality parameter, which only depends on the molecular structure and concentrations of the chiral molecule. We also observe a pretransitional phenomenon that the helical pitch of the chiral nematic phase increases dramatically when temperature is decreased toward the chiral nematic to twist-bend nematic phase transition temperature.