Fleury Blaise, Senyuk Bohdan, Tasinkevych Mykola, Smalyukh Ivan I
Department of Physics and Soft Materials Research Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, United States.
Departamento de Fı́sica, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-004 Lisboa, Portugal.
Nano Lett. 2020 Nov 11;20(11):7835-7843. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.0c02087. Epub 2020 Oct 30.
Doping of nematic liquid crystals with colloidal nanoparticles presents a rich soft matter platform for controlling material properties and discovering diverse condensed matter phases. We describe nematic nanocolloids that simultaneously exhibit strong electrostatic monopole and dipole moments and yield competing long-range anisotropic interactions. Combined with interactions due to orientational elasticity and order parameter gradients of the nematic host medium, they lead to diverse forms of self-assembly both in the bulk of an aligned liquid crystal and when one-dimensionally confined by singular topological defect lines. Such nanocolloids exhibit facile responses to electric fields. We demonstrate electric reconfigurations of nanocolloidal pair-interactions and discuss how our findings may lead to realizing ferroelectric and dielectric molecular-colloidal fluids with different point group symmetries.
向列型液晶与胶体纳米颗粒的掺杂为控制材料特性和发现多样的凝聚态相提供了一个丰富的软物质平台。我们描述了同时展现出强静电单极矩和偶极矩并产生相互竞争的长程各向异性相互作用的向列型纳米胶体。与向列型主体介质的取向弹性和序参量梯度所产生的相互作用相结合，它们在取向排列的液晶本体中以及被奇异拓扑缺陷线一维限制时都会导致多种自组装形式。这类纳米胶体对电场表现出容易实现的响应。我们展示了纳米胶体对相互作用的电重构，并讨论了我们的发现如何可能导向实现具有不同点群对称性的铁电和介电分子 - 胶体流体。
