Halogen-Bonded Liquid Crystals

While the halogen bond has been recognised and studied for over a hundred years, it is only in more recent times that chemists have begun to apply it and see its possibilities as another supramolecular interaction that can be deployed in the preparation of materials. This review takes one of those areas, liquid crystals, and considers examples of motifs that have been deployed successfully to generate new mesogens. In particular, rather than attempting to be comprehensive, the article reviews critically data from well-characterised systems and seeks to first make some comparisons with analogous hydrogen-bonded materials, before considering how the lability and flexibility of the halogen bond expresses itself in liquid crystal behaviour.