Lateral fluoro-substitution driven molecular packing difference in a series of pyridinium-based chiral ionic liquid crystals

ABSTRACT

A series of pyridinium-based chiral ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) and the intermediated, non-ionic ones (NILCs), were designed and synthesised. All ILCs exhibit enantiotropic SmA phases, while all NILCs exhibit enantiotropic cholesteric and SmA phases. In addition, few of NILCs and ILCs exhibit enantiotropic SmC* phases. Due to the Coulombic force, the clearing points of the ILCs are higher than those of the corresponding NILCs. For ILCs, the lateral fluoro-substitution not only decreases the clearing points, but also drives the formation of bilayer molecular packing structures at the smectic phases.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Ionic liquid crystal
• fluoro-substitution
• chirality
• molecular packing structure

Supplementary material

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Project of Scientific and Technologic Infrastructure of Suzhou (SZS201905) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51673141);National Natural Science Foundation of China [51673141];Project of Scientific and Technologic Infrastructure of Suzhou [SZS201905];