Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Journal | Soft Matter |
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Date | Published - 12 Aug 2015 |
Issue number | 38 |
Volume | 11 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Pages (from-to) | 7547-7557 |
Original language | English |
Herein we report studies on a bimesogen that exhibits a chiral twist bend nematic phase when doped with small weight percentages of a chiral material and a partial phase diagram constructed. At low concentrations a wide temperature range blue phase is observed, whereas at higher concentrations an additional 'nematic-like' mesophase was discovered at a lower temperature than the twist-bend nematic phase. In addition to an apparent isotropic-"isotropic" transition, the doped materials also exhibited a weakly birefringent phase upon annealing in the isotropic liquid phase, implying pretransitional behaviour in the same vein as that seen for TGB phases. When confined in a planar aligned cell, the N<inf>TB</inf> phase exhibited two domains that alternated between light and dark with rotation of the sample stage, as well as the application of an external electric field. Upon the addition of a chiral dopant one of these domains was eliminated, leading to their assignment as twist domains of opposite handedness.
Project: Research project (funded) › Research
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