Syntheses and Optical Properties of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Polymers Utilizing p-Phenylene Bis-(p-(3-acryloxy-2-methylpropyloxy)benzoate

We synthesized chiral choleseric liquid crystalline monomer p-phenylene bis-(p-3-acryloxy-2(S)-methylpropoxy)benzoate (1) and achiral nematic liquid crystalline monomer, p-phenylene p-acryloxy-6-hexyloxy-p-octyloxybenzoate (2) for the construction of cholesteric polymer network with a pitch gradient. In this research we attempted to synthesize cholesteric polymer film which have a wide reflection bandwidth in the region of visible wavelength with the synthesized chiral cholesteric monomer 1 and nematic monomer 2 under various photopoly merization conditions. We succeeded to construct cholesteric polymer film network with a pitch gradient covering more than 200 nm bandwidth in the visible wavelength by diffusion controlled photostructuring method.