Terminal fluorinated nitroxide radical liquid crystalline compounds

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals on 24 May 2015, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/15421406.2015.1032732.
We have synthesized a new series of all-organic paramagnetic liquid crystalline (LC) compounds, which include a five-membered ring nitroxide radical (NR) moiety in the mesogen core and fluorine atoms as terminal substituents. These new compounds are the structural analogs of the previously reported NR-LC compounds, and showed remarkable fluorine substituent effects. The introducing fluorine atom into terminal unit stabilizes nematic phase. However, an excess of fluorination leads to the destabilization of nematic phase.