Blue phases are types of liquid crystal phases that appear in a temperature range between a chiral nematic phase and an isotropic liquid phase. Because blue phases have a three-dimensional cubic structure with lattice periods of several hundred nanometres, they exhibit selective Bragg reflections in the range of visible light corresponding to the cubic lattice. From the viewpoint of applications, although blue phases are of interest for fast light modulators or tunable photonic crystals, the very narrow temperature range, usually less than a few kelvin, within which blue phases exist has always been a problem. Here we show the stabilization of blue phases over a temperature range of more than 60 K including room temperature (260-326 K). Furthermore, we demonstrate an electro-optical switching with a response time of the order of 10(-4) s for the stabilized blue phases at room temperature.
An anomalously large dielectric permittivity of ≈10 is found in the mesophase temperature range (MP phase) wherein high fluidity is observed for a liquid-crystal compound having a 1,3-dioxane unit in the mesogenic core (DIO). In this temperature range, no sharp X-ray diffraction peak is observed at both small and wide Bragg angles, similar to that for a nematic phase; however, an inhomogeneous sandy texture or broken Schlieren one is observed via polarizing optical microscopy, unlike that for a conventional nematic phase. DIO exhibits polarization switching with a large polarization value, i.e., P = 4.4 µC cm , and a parallelogram-shaped polarization-electric field hysteresis loop in the MP phase. The inhomogeneously aligned DIO in the absence of an electric field adopts a uniform orientation along an applied electric field when field-induced polarization switching occurs. Furthermore, sufficiently larger second-harmonic generation is observed for DIO in the MP phase. Second-harmonic-generation interferometry clearly shows that the sense of polarization is inverted when the +/- sign of the applied electric field in MP is reversed. These results suggest that a unidirectional, ferroelectric-like parallel polar arrangement of the molecules is generated along the director in the MP phase.
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