Lyotropic liquid crystals

A sufficiently concentrated solution of surfactants exhibits a range of interesting self-organization phenomena. At low concentrations the surfactants will organize into micelles, but at somewhat higher concentrations these micelles can order up orientationally into long-range ordered lyotropic liquid crystal phases. At the same time disc-shaped micelles may grow laterally into bilayers, leading to a lamellar liquid crystal phase (the lyotropic equivalent of a smectic), or rod-shaped micelles may grow in length and pack together into a columnar phase, often with hexagonal symmetry.

In the SNM lab research we utilize and study lyotropic liquid crystal formation of many kinds. Many colloidal suspensions can form lyotropic liquid crystal phases, also suspensions of hard particles rather than surfactant solutions. The sole requirement is that a sufficient concentration of sufficiently anisometric (rod- or disc-shaped) particles are in suspension without aggregating, thus this is an interesting route for aligning a variety of nanoparticles such as carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes.


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