Optical isotropy and iridescence in a smectic ‘blue phase’

When liquid crystal molecules are chiral, the twisted structure competes with spatially uniform liquid crystalline orders, resulting in a variety of modulated liquid crystal phases, such as the cholesteric blue phase1, twist grain boundary2,3,4 and smectic blue phases5. Here we report a liquid crystal smectic blue phase (SmBPiso), formed from a two-component mixture containing a chiral monomer and a ‘twin’ containing two repeat units of the first molecule connected by a linear hydrocarbon spacer. The phase exhibits the simultaneous presence of finite local-order parameters of helices and smectic layers, without any discontinuity on a mesoscopic length scale. The anomalous softening of elasticity due to a strong reduction in entropy caused by mixing the monomer and the twin permits the seamless coexistence of these two competing liquid crystal orders. The new phase spontaneously exhibits an optically isotropic but uniformly iridescent colour and automatically acquires spherical symmetry, so that the associated photonic band gap6,7,8,9 maintains the same symmetry despite the local liquid crystalline order. We expect a range of unusual optical transmission properties based on this three-dimensional isotropic structure, and complete tunability due to the intrinsic softness and responsiveness of the liquid crystalline order against external fields.