Smectic Phases of Liquid Crystalline Rod-Like Helical Polymers

Abstract

It is intuitively easy to understand that various attractive intermolecular interactions play a crucial role in stabilizing various smectic liquid crystalline (LC) phases. However, it has been theoretically shown that systems of simple hard rod-like particles and their mixtures give rise to various unexpected smectic phases along with the most common LC sequence of the nematic—smectic—columnar phases based on computer simulations only with an excluded volume interaction taken into consideration. In order to experimentally verify these theoretical predictions, rod-like helical polymers with very narrow molecular weight distributions, which were prepared by precisely controlled polymerization and fractionation, which could be considered ideal models, have shown to almost quantitatively reproduce these predictions. The unique features of these smectic phases formed in rod-like helical polymers are described.