High-Temperature Mesomorphic Glassy Liquid Crystals with Exclusive Cholesteric Mesomorphism

Glassy liquid crystals (GLCs) are a unique class of materials that can preserve their spontaneously ordered liquid crystalline state upon cooling through the glass-transition temperature. We are studying a series of GLCs with high morphological stability that display exclusive mesomorphism of the nematic and cholesteric type over a broad temperature range. The ability to process these compounds into well-ordered, nm and µm thick films with large area monodomains, opens the door for a wide range of compact, robust optical applications. Improvements in chemical synthesis alongside the selection of the core and pendant groups allow these materials to be scaled up to gram-level while retaining thermal and optical properties. Resulting films offer near perfect circular polarization that is tunable from the near-UV to the mid-IR via simple mixing of enantiomers. Thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) reveal that transition temperatures remain unchanged upon the mixing enantiomers. This enables the versatile design of durable circular polarizers, notch filters, and polarization control devices across different spectral regions and high-temperature environments.