Discotic Liquid Crystals without Tails

Discotic liquid crystals are typically rigid disc shaped molecules, surrounded by long flexible tails, which self assemble into long columns. The tails form a buffer between columns, and serve as an entropy reservoir which helps to maintain the liquid crystal mesophase. However, these tails are difficult to include in both \textit{ab-initio}and molecular dynamics modeling. Frequently the tails are omitted in calculations and simulations as a convenient approximation, but only rarely are they omitted in nature. In this talk we will discuss a novel group of tailless discotic liquid crystals and their properties, both experimentally and \textit{in silico. }Experimental measurements of these molecules, both mesogenic and non-mesogenic, are used to motivate a molecular dynamics study of these unusual materials.