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Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 125503 (2004) [4 pages]

Elongation and Fluctuations of Semiflexible Polymers in a Nematic Solvent

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Z. Dogic1,*, J. Zhang1, A. W. C. Lau1, H. Aranda-Espinoza3, P. Dalhaimer2, D. E. Discher2, P. A. Janmey3, Randall D. Kamien1, T. C. Lubensky1, and A. G. Yodh1
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
2Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
3Institute for Medicine and Engineering, University of Pensylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA

See Also: Erratum

Received 13 October 2003; published 24 March 2004

We directly visualize single polymers with persistence lengths ℓp, ranging from 0.05 to 16  μm, 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.

© 2004 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.125503
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.125503
PACS:
61.30.–v, 64.70.Md, 82.35.Pq

*Current address: Rowland Institute at Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

See Also

Erratum: Z. Dogic, J. Zhang, A. W. Lau, H. Aranda-Espinoza, P. Dalhaimer, D. E. Discher, P. A. Janmey, Randall D. Kamien, T. C. Lubensky, and A. G. Yodh, Erratum: Elongation and Fluctuations of Semiflexible Polymers in a Nematic Solvent [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 125503 (2004)], Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 219902 (2004).

 
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