Stabilising liquid crystalline Blue Phases

Abstract

Liquid crystalline Blue Phases have recently encouraged a large interest in soft matter materials development, due to their possible application in faster and easier to produce displays. One of the principal difficulties of exploiting Blue Phases in general is the fact that they are frustrated phases, normally only occurring in small temperature regimes, well above room-temperature. We present a variety of mechanisms to stabilize Blue Phases, and discuss their physical mechanisms and effectiveness. This covers conventional methods such as chiral doping, bent-core doping, polymer stabilization, all the way to nano-particle doping, nanotube dispersions, and combinations of all of the above. It appears that the stabilization mechanism is very sensitive to the applied conditions, thus optimization is an important factor. We observed the best results for hybrid systems with (i) polymer stabilized bent core doped Blue Phases, and (ii) nanoparticle plus bent core doped Blue Phases. © 2012 The Royal Society of Chemistry.