Output details

Transmission and amplification of information and properties in nanostructured liquid crystals

REVIEW ARTICLE

This paper was invited by Angewandte Chemie, refereed as normal, but placed in the 'Reviews' section on account of its length. The paper is a 'concept' article concerned with understanding the roles of molecular self-organisation and self-assembly in liquid crystals, and the transmission and amplification of mesophase structure to the bulk properties of mesophases. The authors report only their own work on materials synthesised in their laboratory, some of which are new and some known. After a short introduction to concepts and a review of the groups past research, the article attacks the conventional definition of self-assembly, pointing out that the concept of self-organisation is different to that of self-assembly. Moreover, while nematic liquid crystals are governed by elastic continuum theory, the authors point out that their work indicates that concepts similar to swarm theory, abandoned decades ago, are in fact more appropriate for describing complex liquid crystal systems, particularly for the phases of ferroelectric, bent-core, dendritic and supermolecular liquid crystals. The article examines the groups past work in the context of their current understanding of liquid crystals to allow to bring forward a new thesis for understanding self-organisation processes in complex fluids.