ABSTRACT
Liquid crystalline physical gels which consist of a chiral racemic nitroxide radical compound (±)-1 showing a nematic phase and a diamagnetic, chiral organic gelator (R,R)-2 were prepared to investigate the effects of the gelator on the “positive magneto-LC effects” observed in the nematic phase of (±)-1 and the molecular alignment of (±)-1 in the resulting nematic gels. With the increasing amount of the gelator which decreased the domain size, the molecular reorientation by a magnetic field (0.34 T) was considerably restricted in the nematic gel phase and the intermolecular magnetic interactions (positive magneto-LC effects) increased in the fine and random nematic polydomain structure formed by self-assembled fibers of organic gelator molecules.
Funding
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENI (Grant numbers 26248024 and 15J01040). YT is very grateful to the JSPS Research Fellowships for Young Scientists.