Helical Crystal Assemblies in Nonracemic Chiral Liquid Crystalline Polymers: Where Chemistry and Physics Meet†

Chirality transfer (or amplification) in soft materials is an important topic for understanding how chiral assemblies develop from the atomic level to macroscopic objects. This is an interdisciplinary area which is critically associated with the evolution from asymmetric chemistry to asymmetric physics, and, more specifically, in biomaterials, liquid crystals, and polymers. In this review, we discuss our recent studies on the conditions for chirality transfer across different length scales. We observed that the formation of helical structures in different length scales is a typical process in chirality transfer. This is illustrated by a series of nonracemic chiral main-chain liquid crystalline (LC) polyesters, PETs(R*-n). The polymers contained a different number of methylene units in the chain backbone (from 7 to 11). All of the PETs(R*-n) macroscopically exhibited an LC chiral smectic C (SC*) phase, a chiral smectic A (SA*) phase, and a twist grain boundary smectic A (TGBA*) phase with increasing temper...