A Self-Assembled Bicontinuous Cubic Phase with a Single-Diamond Network

Xiangbing Zeng; Silvio Poppe; Anne Lehmann; Marko Prehm; Changlong Chen; Feng Liu; Huanjun Lu; Goran Ungar; Carsten Tschierske

doi:10.1002/anie.201902677

A Self-Assembled Bicontinuous Cubic Phase with a Single-Diamond Network

Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2019 May 27;58(22):7375-7379. doi: 10.1002/anie.201902677. Epub 2019 Apr 23.

Authors

Xiangbing Zeng¹, Silvio Poppe², Anne Lehmann², Marko Prehm², Changlong Chen³, Feng Liu³, Huanjun Lu^{1

4}, Goran Ungar^{1

3}, Carsten Tschierske²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK.
² Institute of Chemistry, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Kurt-Mothes-Straße 2, 06120, Halle, Germany.
³ State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behaviour of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710049, P. R. China.
⁴ Present address: College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.

PMID: 30920713
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201902677

Abstract

The first single-diamond cubic phase in a liquid crystal is reported. This skeletal structure with the $F d \overline{3} m$ space group is formed by self-assembly of bolaamphiphiles with swallow-tailed lateral chains. It consists of bundles of π-conjugated p-terphenyl rods fused into an infinite network by hydrogen-bonded spheres at tetrahedral four-way junctions. We also present a quantitative model relating molecular architecture to the space-filling requirements of six possible bicontinuous cubic phases, that is, the single- and double-network versions of gyroid, diamond, and "plumber's nightmare".

Keywords: X-ray diffraction; bolaamphiphiles; liquid crystals; self-assembly; single-diamond networks.

Abstract

Grants and funding