Chlorine-Substituted Bent-Core LC-Based Sono-Gel Hybrid Materials: Synthesis and Optical Properties

Abstract

We implemented the catalyst-free sonogel method to disperse and encapsulate a chlorine substituted thermotropic bent shaped liquid crystalline compound. By this means, advanced organic-inorganic hybrid materials with high optical and mechanical quality, suitable for different kind of optical applications, were obtained. Bent-core molecules have shown interesting optical properties, which have not yet been investigated in the solid-state. Therefore, we implemented the sonogel route to fabricate highly pure SiO₂ porous glassy networks which allowed the inclusion of this kind of mesogens in the colloidal sol-state. In this work, we present the preparation and optical performance of these amorphous “banana”-based hybrids via absorption and fluorescence spectroscopies, electro-optical and cubic third-harmonic generation nonlinear optical measurements.

Keywords:

• bent-core molecules
• hybrid materials
• liquid crystals
• NLO
• sol-gel
• sonogel

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Neil Bruce for English revision. One of the authors (O. G. Morales-Saavedra) acknowledges financial support of the DAAD academic organization (Germany).