Highly anisotropic conductivity in organosiloxane liquid crystal

In this paper, we present the conductivity and dielectric characterization of three homologous series of smectic A siloxane containing liquid crystals. The materials studied include one monomesogenic series, which consists of a 4-(omega-alkyloxy)-4(')-cyanobiphenyl unit terminated by pentamethyldisiloxane, and two bimesogenic series, which consist of twin 4-(omega-alkyloxy)-4(')-cyanobiphenyls joined via tetramethyldisiloxane or decamethylpentasiloxane. All of the compounds exhibit wide temperature range enantiotropic smectic A phases; the effect of the siloxane moiety is to suppress nematic morphology even in the short chain homologs. We find that these compounds exhibit a highly anisotropic conductivity: the value perpendicular to the director is to up to 200 times that parallel to the director. For the nonsiloxane analog 4-(omega-octyl)-4(')-cyanobiphenyl (8CB), this value is approximately 2. It is also found that the dielectric anisotropy is reduced significantly; a typical value is similar to 1 compared to 8.4 for 8CB. We propose that the origin of these unusual properties is in the smectic structure; the microphase separation of the bulky, globular siloxane moieties into liquidlike regions severely inhibits the mobility parallel to the director and across the smectic layers. Further, the inclusion of this unit acts to increase the antiparallel correlations of molecular dipoles in the aromatic and alkyloxy sublayers, reducing the dielectric anisotropy significantly compared to nonsiloxane analogs. The highly anisotropic conductivity suggests that these materials are particularly suitable for application in electro-optic effects which exploit this property, e.g., the bistable electro-optic effect in smectic A liquid crystals. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.