Hemiphasmidic Side-Chain Liquid Crystalline Polymer: From Smectic C Phase to Columnar Phase with a Bundle of Chains as Its Building Block

Jun-Feng Zheng; Xin Liu; Xiao-Fang Chen; Xiang-Kui Ren; Shuang Yang; Er-Qiang Chen

doi:10.1021/mz3001435

Hemiphasmidic Side-Chain Liquid Crystalline Polymer: From Smectic C Phase to Columnar Phase with a Bundle of Chains as Its Building Block

ACS Macro Lett. 2012 May 15;1(5):641-645. doi: 10.1021/mz3001435. Epub 2012 Apr 26.

Authors

Jun-Feng Zheng¹, Xin Liu¹, Xiao-Fang Chen¹, Xiang-Kui Ren¹, Shuang Yang¹, Er-Qiang Chen¹

Affiliation

¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Department of Polymer Science and Engineering and Key Laboratory of Polymer Chemistry and Physics of Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.

PMID: 35607078
DOI: 10.1021/mz3001435

Abstract

We synthesized a new hemiphasmidic side-chain liquid crystalline polymer (P-n, n is the number of carbons in alky tail of the side chain, n = 4-12) using free radical polymerization. The side chain of P-n has a biphenyl in the middle, linked to the polystyrene backbone and to the terminal phenyl group with three alkyl tails via only methyleneoxy units. Upon increasing n, the mesophase of P-n changes from bilayer smectic C to hexagonal columnar (Φ_h) phase with the a-dimension of ∼6 nm. Both of the mesophases are long-range ordered, which can be well aligned by simple shearing. The oriented Φ_h shows a quite low rotational disorder around the shear direction. Most likely, the Φ_h phase takes a bundle of chains (e.g., ∼five chains) rather than a single chain as its building block. This "multi-chain model" of the Φ_h phase may represent a new type of self-assembly in side-chain polymers.