Blue Phase Liquid Crystals Using Photocurable Monomers for Nano-structured Materials

抄録

Blue phase is an attractive liquid crystal because of the 3-dimensional nano-structure. We have tried to obtain the blue phase using photocurable mesogenic monomers and chiral dopant and solidify the blue phase structure by irradiation of ultra-violet light. Furthermore, we have examined the mechanical strength of the solidified blue phase. As a result, we found that the appearance of blue phase strongly depended on the combination of mesogenic monomers and the concentration of chiral dopant, and then the blue phase structure could remain even after the polymerization. In the mechanical strength, the solidified blue phase samples are more fragile than the solidified samples which have been photocured in the choresteric phase. This fact may result from a discontinuous lattice structure including defects, i.e. platelet texture, as seen in microscopic texture observation.