Hydrogen bonding and the design of twist-bend nematogens

Rebecca Walker* (Corresponding Author), Damian Pociecha, Catriona A. Crawford, John M.D. Storey, Ewa Gorecka, Corrie T. Imrie

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

The phase properties of equimolar mixtures consisting of a hydrogen bond donor, a 4-alkoxybenzoic acid (nOBA), and one of two different stilbazole-based hydrogen bond acceptors, either 4-[(E)-2-(4-{[6-(4′-methoxy[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-yl)hexyl]oxy}phenyl)-ethenyl]-pyridine (1OB6OS) or 4-[(E)-4′-(6-{4-[(E)-2-(pyridin-4-yl)ethenyl]phenoxy}hexyl)-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-carbonitrile (CB6OS) are reported. Neither hydrogen bond acceptor exhibits liquid crystal behaviour whereas the nOBA compounds show smectic and/or nematic behaviour depending on the length of the alkyloxy chain. For the complexes of an nOBA with n = 1–5, both conventional nematic and twist-bend nematic phases were observed, while for n ≥ 6 smectic phases emerged and the twist-bend nematic phase was extinguished. The CB6OS-nOBA mixtures may exhibit the heliconical smectic CTB phase. The local molecular arrangement in the two sets of mixtures are similar and changes on increasing n but this is not reflected in the nematic-isotropic transition temperatures. Birefringence studies of the mixtures are reported. In general the behaviour of the hydrogen-bonded mixtures is similar to that of their covalently bonded counterparts.

Original languageEnglish
Article number112630
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of molecular liquids
Volume303
Early online date3 Feb 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2020

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
The work was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) under the grant no. 2016/22/A/ST5/00319. RW gratefully thanks the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for the award of a PhD Scholarship (2015-2018). The Erasmus programme is thanked for supporting a study visit for CAC to Warsaw.

Declaration of competing interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Author statement
Rebecca Walker: Investigation, Formal analysis, Validation, Visualisation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Reviewing and Editing Damian Pociecha: Visualisation, Investigation, Formal analysis Catriona Crawford: Investigation, Formal analysis John MD Storey: Resources, Supervision Ewa Gorecka: Investigation, Formal analysis, Resources, Supervision Corrie T Imrie: Conceptualization, Supervision, Resources, Writing – Reviewing and Editing

Keywords

  • LIQUID-CRYSTAL DIMERS
  • SYMMETRY-BREAKING
  • NEMATIC PHASE
  • OLIGOMERS
  • BEHAVIOR

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