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Published on: February 27, 2019
Strategies to Stabilize the Photoinduced Supramolecular Chirality in Azobenzene Liquid Crystalline Polymers
Jorge Royes1,2, Luis Oriol3, Rosa M Tejedor4,5
1Departamento de Química Orgánica, Facultad de Ciencias, Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Aragón (ICMA), Universidad de Zaragoza-CSIC, c/ Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain. jorge.royes@ens.fr.
Abstract:
This paper describes the synthesis, thermal characterization and optical properties of liquid crystalline homopolymers and block copolymers with a repeating unit consisting of two functional units, with at least one of them being an azobenzene. Films of these polymers have been irradiated with circularly polarized light at room temperature, evaluating the intensity of the photoinduced chiral signal and its temporal stability upon storage. The paper also explores two different strategies to restrict the relaxation of the photoinduced order. Firstly, block copolymers have been prepared to confine the photoaddressable segments into nanoscopic domains where relaxation should be restricted. Secondly, an alternative homopolymer has been synthesized where the repeating unit combines two chromophores that can be separately photoaddressed, an azobenzene unit to efficiently photoinduce chirality and a cinnamate to fix the chiral signal by photocrosslinking.
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