Vidhika Punjani

• PhD Student at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali

The growing demand for advanced photonic and electro-optical devices necessitates the rational design of novel functional materials. Liquid crystals (LCs) are particularly promising due to their highly tunable electro-optical properties. Building on this potential, we synthesized a series of polar bent-core LCs, F4-na (dipole moment ∼9.4 D), featur...

Non-symmetrical cholesterol-based dimers have emerged as crucial materials in the field of liquid crystal research, owing to their remarkable ability to stabilize various exotic mesophases, including the cholesteric nematic (N*)...

In order to enhance the efficiency of chiro-optical and electro-optical devices, it is of paramount importance to engineer chiral bent-core liquid crystals (LCs) endowed with exceptional stability across a broad...

Bent-core liquid crystals (BLCs) are a class of thermotropic LCs that exhibit chiral and polar superstructures in achiral molecules. Progress in design and synthesis of novel bent-core architectures in search of unconventional properties enriched the field of BLCs. Here, we present a comprehensive review of the recent bent-shaped LCs, discuss relev...

Nowadays, intensive research has focused on the design and synthesis of function-integrated smart materials resulting from the spontaneous self-assembly of the predestined functional molecules. Working in this direction, we have...

Recently, an unprecedented observation of polar order, thermochromic behavior, and exotic mesophases in new chiral, bent‐shaped systems with a −CH3 moiety placed at the transverse position of the central core was reported. Herein, a homologous series of compounds with even‐numbered carbon chains from n=4 to 18 were synthesized, in which −Cl was sub...

We have studied two new series of polar and non-polar four-ring based achiral bent-core molecules containing CN and OCH3 moiety respectively at the tip of the molecular short arm and their molecular self-assembly in crystal and liquid crystal state. Crystal structure analysis revealed the bent molecular geometry of the compounds with bent angle 151...

An extensive study of the effect of terminal halogens on the structure-property relationship in three series of polar short-core hockey-stick shaped or L-shaped mesogens has been elucidated. The behaviour of the halogens at the tip of the short arm and the role of end alkyl chain at the long arm on the phase structure of the mesogens have been char...

A new approach accompanied by superstructural frustration is reported by attaching a cholesterol moiety directly to the central bent-core system that displayed exotic BPIII, BPII/I, Ncyb*, TGBA phases including SmAPA, SmA and SmX phases as derived by X-ray scattering results. While higher homologue of the series exhibited spontaneous formation of p...

Research on low-temperature polar bent-core nematogens having lower molecular weight has gathered appreciable momentum by virtue of their significance in potential applications. However, the lack of availability and easy-to-perform synthesis processes appears to be the bottleneck towards their fabrication and thereby limiting their possible device...

We report the basic structural understanding of a new class of achiral three-ring bent-core compounds with an imine and ester linkage at the molecular bend, which are shown to exhibit nematic and orthogonal smectic phases at lower temperature. The occurrence of the orthogonal smectic and nematic ordering has been confirmed by optical texture, DSC s...

We report the synthesis and characterization of a new class of achiral three-ring bent-core compounds with an amide and ester linkage at the molecular bend, which are shown to exhibit nematic/phases in wide temperature ranges around room temperature (RT) and undulated SmC phases below RT. In contrast to previous studies, the compounds reported in t...