Spontaneous chiral induction in a rod-like liquid crystal by introducing bent terminal chains

Abstract

Spontaneous chiral induction in bent-core liquid crystals has been widely studied in the field of liquid crystals, but there are few reports on rod-like liquid crystals. In this study, as a new and simple approach to induce chirality from achiral liquid crystal molecules, we have designed rod-like liquid crystal molecules with bent terminal chains (B3-Ol). As a result, B3-Ol exhibited three smectic phases and induced chirality in smectic I phases. We considered that the suppression of molecular motions by introduction of bent terminal chains enhances the intermolecular interaction between the core moieties to generate chiral symmetry breaking.