Issue 48, 2021

The synthesis and application of novel benzodithiophene based reactive mesogens with negative wavelength dispersion birefringence

Abstract

Optical corrective retardation films are widely used in the display industry to compensate for a variety of imperfections such as off-axis contrast reduction, grey-scale inversion and colour shifts in LCDs and backplane reflections in OLEDs. A wide variety of these films have been produced by multiple methods, however, obtaining ideal wavelength dispersion remains difficult and costly to achieve in thin, single-layer systems. In this work, we report the synthesis of a novel series of reactive mesogen materials designed to exhibit negative wavelength dispersion birefringence. This series of photopolymerisable materials based on a benzodithiophene core exhibiting either an ‘X’-shaped or ‘T’-shaped geometry were synthesised. Their negative wavelength dispersion birefringence properties were investigated in aligned films prepared from photo-polymerised reactive mesogen host mixtures. The nature of the substituents on the BDT core was found to have a significant impact on performance, and materials with an X-shaped geometry were found to exhibit much higher performance than those with a T-shape.

Graphical abstract: The synthesis and application of novel benzodithiophene based reactive mesogens with negative wavelength dispersion birefringence

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
20 okt 2021
Accepted
18 nov 2021
First published
18 nov 2021
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2021,9, 17419-17426

The synthesis and application of novel benzodithiophene based reactive mesogens with negative wavelength dispersion birefringence

J. D. W. Allen, K. Adlem and M. Heeney, J. Mater. Chem. C, 2021, 9, 17419 DOI: 10.1039/D1TC05068K

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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