Nonlinear optical properties ferroelectric liquid crystalline

Cross-linked polymeric liquid crystals offer a wide variety of unique and in-tere.sting properties. Because of the interaction between the mesogens and the network backbone in liquid crystal elastomers, mechanical deformations can align the director, and these materials are piezoelectric. Industrial applications of liquid crystalline thermosets are driven by additional properties such as toughness, a tunable coefficient of thermal expansion, ferroelectricity, and nonlinear optical properties. Reviews on this topic are given by Barclay and Ober [4] and by Warner and Terentjev [5]. 

Our interest in bowlic liquid crystals has arisen from the proposal that bowl shaped molecules may exhibit polar (noncentrosymmetric) organization in the liquid crystalline phases [4, 8, 9]. Indeed bowlic liquid crystals are natural noncentrosymmetric building blocks since a head-to-tail organization maximizes the interactions between bowlic cores. New methodologies for the creation of noncentrosymmetric structures in molecular solids and liquids are critical to the development of new materials with ferroelectric and second order nonlinear optical (NLO) properties [14, 15]. Liquid crystalline methods are particularly attractive since liquid crystalline materials are easily deposited for device construction and are readily aligned. 

---