ABSTRACT
Mixing bent-shaped mesogens with other materials such as calamitic molecules, organic solvents, and metal nanoparticles reveals a variety of new phenomena. This chapter describes some of these phenomena and the efforts on metal nanoparticles in bent-shaped liquid crystal (LC) systems. To study nanoparticles in LC phases, Marx et al. prepared mixtures of nanoparticle and bent-core molecules. Since the nanoparticles are decorated by monolayered bent-core molecules, the nanoparticles can be reasonably well dispersed in bent-shaped LC hosts. The most important purpose of using LCs in nanoparticle systems is to fabricate an ordered structure of nanoparticles. In this sense, bent-shaped molecules are interesting as LC molecules for grafting to nanoparticles and nanoclusters, since bent-shaped molecules exhibit a variety of complex phases and may provide different types of interactions including steric, polar, and chiral ones.
