Dear Colleagues,
Liquid crystals represent a class of soft materials with very peculiar properties, mostly related to the rich variety of structures having different degrees of 1D, 2D or 3D order. These partially ordered systems have been the object of NMR investigations since the 1960s, but they are still considered a challenging topic for the development of new NMR methods. Moreover, NMR spectroscopy was often a crucial technique in order to clarify the relationship between the macroscopic and molecular-level properties of liquid crystals.
In recent years, increasing interests about new liquid crystalline materials, the discovery of novel mesophases and their supramolecular structures, have offered the opportunity to apply NMR spectroscopy to investigate several fundamental aspects of liquid crystals, such as the conformational behavior, the orientational ordering, the alignment and director distribution properties, as well as molecular and collective dynamics.
This Special Issue, entitled “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance of Liquid Crystals”, aims to collect original research papers and review articles concerning the most recent research in this field, taking into account both theoretical and experimental works.
The potential topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:
- NMR characterization of new mesophases
- Development of new NMR methods to study liquid crystals
- Multinuclear NMR approach to study liquid crystals
- Study of the orientational order of liquid crystals by NMR
- Study of the molecular dynamics of liquid crystals by NMR
- NMR relaxometry applied to liquid crystals
- NMR diffusometry applied to liquid crystals
- NMR study of biaxial phases
- NMR study of lyotropic liquid crystals
- NMR study of ionic liquid crystals
- NMR study of thermotropic liquid crystals
- NMR methods to study conformational properties in partially oriented media
- NMR study of liquid crystalline polymers, elastomers and gels.
- NMR investigations of nanostructured composites based on liquid crystals
- NMR investigations of self-assembled biological systems
It is my pleasure to invite you and your colleagues to submit a manuscript to this Special Issue of the MDPI journal CRYSTALS.
Prof. Dr. Valentina Domenici
Guest Editor