TY - JOUR
T1 - Diffusionless transformation of soft cubic superstructure from amorphous to simple cubic and body-centered cubic phases
AU - Liu, Jie
AU - Liu, Wenzhe
AU - Guan, Bo
AU - Wang, Bo
AU - Shi, Lei
AU - Jin, Feng
AU - Zheng, Zhigang
AU - Wang, Jingxia
AU - Ikeda, Tomiki
AU - Jiang, Lei
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful for the financial support from the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0200803, 2017YFA0204504, 2016YFB0402004, 2016YFA0301100, 2016YFA0302000, and 2018YFA0306201), NSFC (Grant No. 51873221, 52073292, 51673207, 51673208,61822504, 51873060, 91963212, 11774063 and 11727811), the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Z181100004418012), Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dutch research project (1A111KYSB20190072), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (Grants No. 17ZR1442300 and No. 17142200100) and Beijing Natural Science Foundation (2182079). We thank Prof. Guang Mo, the member of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for assistance with Syn-SAXS testing by the 1W2A SAXS beamline at the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - In a narrow temperature window in going from the isotropic to highly chiral orders, cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit so-called blue phases, consisting of different morphologies of long, space-filling double twisted cylinders. Those of cubic spatial symmetry have attracted considerable attention in recent years as templates for soft photonic materials. The latter often requires the creation of monodomains of predefined orientation and size, but their engineering is complicated by a lack of comprehensive understanding of how blue phases nucleate and transform into each other at a submicrometer length scale. In this work, we accomplish this by intercepting nucleation processes at intermediate stages with fast cross-linking of a stabilizing polymer matrix. We reveal using transmission electron microscopy, synchrotron small-angle X-ray diffraction, and angle-resolved microspectroscopy that the grid of double-twisted cylinders undergoes highly coordinated, diffusionless transformations. In light of our findings, the implementation of several applications is discussed, such as temperature-switchable QR codes, micro-area lasing, and fabrication of blue phase liquid crystals with large domain sizes.
AB - In a narrow temperature window in going from the isotropic to highly chiral orders, cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit so-called blue phases, consisting of different morphologies of long, space-filling double twisted cylinders. Those of cubic spatial symmetry have attracted considerable attention in recent years as templates for soft photonic materials. The latter often requires the creation of monodomains of predefined orientation and size, but their engineering is complicated by a lack of comprehensive understanding of how blue phases nucleate and transform into each other at a submicrometer length scale. In this work, we accomplish this by intercepting nucleation processes at intermediate stages with fast cross-linking of a stabilizing polymer matrix. We reveal using transmission electron microscopy, synchrotron small-angle X-ray diffraction, and angle-resolved microspectroscopy that the grid of double-twisted cylinders undergoes highly coordinated, diffusionless transformations. In light of our findings, the implementation of several applications is discussed, such as temperature-switchable QR codes, micro-area lasing, and fabrication of blue phase liquid crystals with large domain sizes.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107460502&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-021-23631-w
DO - 10.1038/s41467-021-23631-w
M3 - Article
C2 - 34108449
AN - SCOPUS:85107460502
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 3477
ER -