Spin me right round – a versatile BTA-based alignment media toolbox for enhanced enantiodiscrimination

Abstract

Benzenetricarboxamides (BTAs) have been introduced as modular building blocks forming lyotropic liquid crystals (LLC) by self-assembly. Herein, we present a toolbox of chiral BTA-based LLCs as alignment media for the measurement of residual dipolar couplings (RDCs). We present one system based on new asymmetrically substituted BTAs and a sergeant and soldier (SaS) system based on mixtures of chiral and achiral BTA building blocks. We investigate their enantiodiscriminating properties and scalability thereof.