Metallomesogens as Biaxial Dopants in a Calamitic Nematic Liquid Crystal

Abstract

The electric field induced nematic order reconstruction is a way to achieve controlled transitions between uniaxial nematic textures with different topologies, hence allowing intrinsic textural bistability. The order reconstruction connects perpendicular nematic director orientations by exchanging two eigenvalues of the nematic order tensor Q , implying intermediate transient biaxial order. This phenomenon avoids the full nematic melting; in fact the nematic scalar order parameter does not vanish. The Biaxial Order Reconstruction in a calamitic Nematic (BORN) is mainly governed by the biaxial coherence length ξ _b . Therefore, by varying ξ _b , one can favour or inhibit the transient biaxial order. Recently, it has been demonstrated that ξ _b can be controlled by suitable dopants and in this work we study the BORN transition threshold for liquid crystal mixtures made of the commercial nematic liquid crystal E7 and three different metallomesogens with board-like shape.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Mauro Ghedini and Daniela Pucci for materials synthesis and helpful discussion and Alfredo Pane for technical assistance.