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....

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Physical review letters Vol. 92; no. 12; p. 125503
Main Authors:	Dogic, Z, Zhang, J, Lau, A W C, Aranda-Espinoza, H, Dalhaimer, P, Discher, D E, Janmey, P A, Kamien, Randall D, Lubensky, T C, Yodh, A G
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States 26-03-2004
Subjects:	Actins - chemistry Bacteriophage lambda - genetics Bacteriophage M13 - chemistry Biopolymers - chemistry DNA, Viral - chemistry Fluorescent Dyes - chemistry Micelles Neurofilament Proteins - chemistry Solvents
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	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.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0031-9007 1079-7114
DOI:	10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.125503