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| Several years ago, Center members discovered, in a class of liquid crystal materials made of banana-shaped or bent core molecules, the formation of spontaneously chiral (left- or right-handed) layers. The resulting chiral domains were macroscopic – the first spontaneously formed chiral domains in a fluid since Pasteur discovered such separation in a crystal 150 years ago. The layers in these liquid crystals were polar and ordered in an antiferroelectric fashion (adjacent layers with opposite polar direction) in absence of applied field. In the past year, Center researchers have discovered a ferroelectric banana phase, in which the polar ordering is uniform in all layers in a domain, even in absence of applied field. This new material, MHOBOW, was designed and synthesized in the Center, and its evaluation was recently reported [Science 288, 2181 (2000)]. The images show a single chiral domain in which the brush (dark band) alignment, indicating the orientation of the molecules, is established with an electric field applied (top right), and remains upon removal of the field (bottom right), indicative of the ferroelectric ordering. |  |
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