Srigengan, S orcid.org/0000-0003-2320-5589, Liu, H, Osipov, MA et al. (3 more authors) (2020) Anomalies in the twist elastic behaviour of mixtures of calamitic and bent-core liquid crystals. Liquid Crystals, 47 (6). pp. 895-907. ISSN 0267-8292
Abstract
The splay, twist and bend elastic constants (K11, K22 and K33) have been measured as a function of temperature in bent-core/calamitic mixtures based on three different calamitic materials (5CB, 8CB and ZLI1132) and two bent-core dopants. The behaviour of the splay and bend constants are as expected; a reduction in K33 of ~20%, in line with predictions from mixing rules and other observations. Interestingly, no change is seen in the splay constant, K11 of the calamitic hosts. Surprisingly though, the twist elastic constant exhibits a reduction of 30 – 40% in all mixtures across the nematic range, an effect not previously reported and much larger than mixing rules can explain. The elastic behaviour is universal in our mixtures. We explain part of the reduction in the twist deformation by considering the influence of the chiral conformer fluctuations of the bent-core molecules on the twist elastic constants of the mixtures. However, the dramatic reduction can only be fully explained by also including contributions from chiral conformer fluctuations of the calamitic host, a form of chiral amplification.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Elastic properties; bent-core liquid crystals; calamitic liquid crystals; liquid crystal mixtures; chirality; polarity |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Soft Matter Physics (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Nov 2019 11:39 |
Last Modified: | 20 Jun 2021 09:18 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/02678292.2019.1687767 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:153225 |