Bent-core alignment monolayers

Langmuir Films have been source of high expectations not just because of the opportunity that they provide to study low-dimensional fluids, but also because of the practical and potential applications that comes from the possibility to transfer these thin films into another surface, through Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) and Langmuir-Schaefer (LS) techniques. We use these transference techniques to deposit a monolayer of a bent-core liquid crystal molecule (Z2B) into different substrates, to use later as alignment layer in a liquid crystal cell, where the direction and degree of the alignment is changed by increasing and decreasing the packing of the molecules in the monolayer (dipping the substrate on a Langmuir Trough with different surface pressures).