- Tuchband, Michael R;
- Paterson, Daniel A;
- Salamończyk, Mirosław;
- Norman, Victoria A;
- Scarbrough, Alyssa N;
- Forsyth, Ewan;
- Garcia, Edgardo;
- Wang, Cheng;
- Storey, John MD;
- Walba, David M;
- Sprunt, Samuel;
- Jákli, Antal;
- Zhu, Chenhui;
- Imrie, Corrie T;
- Clark, Noel A
We synthesized the liquid crystal dimer and trimer members of a series of flexible linear oligomers and characterized their microscopic and nanoscopic properties using resonant soft X-ray scattering and a number of other experimental techniques. On the microscopic scale, the twist-bend phases of the dimer and trimer appear essentially identical. However, while the liquid crystal dimer exhibits a temperature-dependent variation of its twist-bend helical pitch varying from 100 to 170 Å on heating, the trimer exhibits an essentially temperature-independent pitch of 66 Å, significantly shorter than those reported for other twist-bend forming materials in the literature. We attribute this to a specific combination of intrinsic conformational bend of the trimer molecules and a sterically favorable intercalation of the trimers over a commensurate fraction (two-thirds) of the molecular length. We develop a geometric model of the twist-bend phase for these materials with the molecules arranging into helical chain structures, and we fully determine their respective geometric parameters.