The design and study of lemniscular and helicene based molecules

I will be applying organic synthetic techniques to forming novel molecules which have either a helical or figure-ofeight
shape. These molecules are chiral and offer intriguing possibilities for the manipulation of bulk phases in the
context of mirror image symmetry breaking. We will especially look to study self-assembly and their use as dopants
in liquid crystalline materials. Some intriguing possibilities are to develop these materials with a view to examining the
possibility of whether we can form exotic soft-matter topological quasiparticles.
We will seek to characterise these materials with a range if imaging techniques including polarised optical
microscopy, confocal microscopy, electron microscopy and high-speed dynamical imaging.
We envisage the reproducible formation of topological defects in small dimension droplets as having remarkable
optical properties with possible future directions in display and memory storage applications. We will work closely
with soft-matter modellers and work towards an understanding of how such complex knotted defects form in a
dynamical context. The topological defects we have started to examine have implications of self-assembled
structures from the small to the large scales, i.e. particle physics through to cosmology, and hence manageable
scales, such as soft-matter chemistry offer an ideal opportunity to expand our knowledge across scales in the
physical sciences.