Recently, the research team led by Professors Haifeng Yu and Huai Yang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering at Peking University has made an important progress in the fabrication of supramolecularly halogen-bonded liquid crystals. The results titled “Photoresponsive Liquid Crystals Based on Halogen Bonding of Azopyridines” have been published in the famous journal Chemical Communications.

Halogen bonds have received increasing attention due to their more directional feature and the convenience to adjust interaction strength by choosing suitable halogen atoms. In this work, they report on using molecular halogen and azopyridine compounds to fabricate a series of photoresponsive halogen-bonded liquid crystals, which show interesting properties of photoinduced phase transition upon UV irradiation. In addition, bromine-bonded liquid crystals were first obtained with high mesophase stability. Due to its importance in the field of liquid crystal materials science and engineering, it has been selected as the back cover of this issue.

This work was supported by the Major Project of Beijing Science and Technology Program, the Major Project of International Cooperation of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, the State Education Ministry.