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Synthesis of Programmable Main-chain Liquid-crystalline Elastomers Using a Two-stage Thiol-acrylate Reaction
Published on: January 19, 2016
Order and strain in main-chain smectic liquid-crystalline polymers and elastomers
W H de Jeu1, E P Obraztsov, B I Ostrovskii
1FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics, Kruislaan 407, 1098 SJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. dejeu@mail.pse.umass.edu
Abstract:
The layer correlations in main-chain smectic liquid-crystal polymer and elastomer systems have been studied using high-resolution X-ray scattering. In contrast to side-chain smectic polymers, in main-chain systems the polymer chains are oriented parallel to the layer normal. As a result they couple directly to the lamellar structure and any polymer defect is translated into layer distortions. For the homopolymers the resulting X-ray lineshapes are well described by Lorentzians. This is interpreted as an average of algebraically decaying order in domains with dimensions of hundreds of nm and a wide dispersion of sizes. The elastomers show much broader peaks than the correponding polymers. This is attributed to strong non-uniform strain within the finite-size domains due to defects of the layer structure.
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