Abstract
A novel strategy for preparing non-symmetric chiral twin liquid crystals was proposed, where two identical chiral moieties were designed to be located at both peripheral ends and the non-symmetric character was introduced by the non-symmetric central connecting structure. Thus, optically active chiral non-symmetric twin homologues, [4′-(1-methylheptyloxycarbonyl)-1,1′-biphenyl-4-yl] 4″″-[ω-[{4″-(1-methylheptyloxycarbonyl)-1″,1″′-biphenyl-4″′-yl}oxycarbonyl]alkyloxy]benzoate, were prepared, which were found to exhibit the antiferro-, ferri-, and ferroelectric phases. Furthermore, two more phases were observed between the ferroelectric and isotropic liquid phases. The lower-temperature phase was optically isotropic under the polarized light microscopy for both of the homogeneously and pseudo-homeotropically aligned thin samples, whereas the high-temperature phase showed a
mosaic texture. Both of these anomalous phases were found to have a layered structure with a smaller layer spacing than the smectic phase. The stability of these phases was quite sensitive to the optical activity. With