TY  - JOUR
AU  - Garlea, Ioana C.
AU  - Dammone, Oliver
AU  - Alvarado, Jose
AU  - Nooteboom, Valerie
AU  - Jia, Yunfei
AU  - Koenderink, Gijsje H.
AU  - Aarts, Dirk G. A. L.
AU  - Lettinga, M. P.
AU  - Mulder, Bela M.
TI  - Colloidal Liquid Crystals Confinedto Synthetic Tactoids
JO  - Scientific reports
VL  - 9
SN  - 2045-2322
CY  - [London]
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
M1  - FZJ-2020-00035
SP  - 20391
PY  - 2019
AB  - When a liquid crystal forming particles are confined to a spatial volume with dimensions comparable to that of their own size, they face a complex trade-off between their global tendency to align and the local constraints imposed by the boundary conditions. This interplay may lead to a non-trivial orientational patterns that strongly depend on the geometry of the confining volume. This novel regime of liquid crystalline behavior can be probed with colloidal particles that are macro-aggregates of biomolecules. Here we study director fields of filamentous fd-viruses in quasi-2D lens-shaped chambers that mimic the shape of tactoids, the nematic droplets that form during isotropic-nematic phase separation. By varying the size and aspect ratio of the chambers we force these particles into confinements that vary from circular to extremely spindle-like shapes and observe the director field using fluorescence microscopy. In the resulting phase diagram, next to configurations predicted earlier for 3D tactoids, we find a number of novel configurations. Using Monte Carlo Simulations, we show that these novel states are metastable, yet long-lived. Their multiplicity can be explained by the co-existence of multiple dynamic relaxation pathways leading to the final stable states
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:31892707
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000508985300012
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41598-019-56729-9
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/868441
ER  -