"Janus" supermolecular liquid crystals--giant molecules with hemispherical architectures.

Liquid crystals represent a unique class of self-organising systems, which although found in many day-to-day practical material applications, such as displays, are also intimately entwined with living processes. They have the potential, just like living systems, to provide us with a unique vehicle for the development of self-ordering nano- and mesoscopic-engineered materials with specific functional properties. In this article we describe a new concept for the design of self-assembling functional liquid crystals as segmented or "Janus" liquid-crystalline supermolecular materials in the form of structures that contain two different types of mesogenic units, which favour different types of mesophase structure, grafted onto the same star-shaped scaffold to create supermolecules that contain different hemispheres. The materials exhibit chiral nematic and chiral smectic C phases.