Unconventional Nematic Liquid Crystals: Phase Transitions and Structure-property Correlations

In the past few years, bent-core liquid crystals have created immense interest in the scientific community because they show several new liquid crystalline phases along with some known phases of calamitic liquid crystals. Concomitantly efforts are made to synthesize liquid crystals with unconventional shapes like, V, W, T etc. Many physical properties of these new liquid crystals are not yet understood. This book is an attempt to understand the structure-property correlation of some unconventional nematic liquid crystals. We have presented some introduction and experimental techniques to measure various physical properties of those unconventional liquid crystals in the first two chapters. In the subsequent chapters we discuss physical properties of liquid crystal mixture of rod-like and bent-core molecules, pure bent-core molecules, hockey stick shaped (asymmetric bent-core) and T-shaped molecules. Finally we discuss flexoelectric properties in the last chapter.