Elongation and fluctuations of semiflexible polymers in a nematic solvent.

We directly visualize single polymers with persistence lengths l(p), ranging from 0.05 to 16 microm, dissolved in the nematic phase of rodlike fd virus. Polymers with a sufficiently large persistence length undergo a coil-rod transition at the isotropic-nematic transition of the background solvent. We quantitatively analyze the transverse fluctuations of the semiflexible polymers and show that at long wavelengths they are driven by the fluctuating nematic background. We extract the Odijk deflection length and the elastic constant of the background nematic phase from the data.