Entropy-driven formation of a chiral liquid-crystalline phase of helical filaments

View/ Open
Date
2006-01-11Author
Barry, Edward
Concept link
Hensel, Zach
Concept link
Dogic, Zvonimir
Concept link
Shribak, Michael
Concept link
Oldenbourg, Rudolf
Concept link
Metadata
Show full item recordCitable URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1912/536As published
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.018305DOI
10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.018305Abstract
We study the liquid-crystalline phase behavior of a concentrated suspension of helical flagella isolated from Salmonella typhimurium. Flagella are prepared with different polymorphic states, some of which have a pronounced helical character while others assume a rodlike shape. We show that the static phase behavior and dynamics of chiral helices are very different when compared to simpler achiral hard rods. With increasing concentration, helical flagella undergo an entropy-driven first order phase transition to a liquid-crystalline state having a novel chiral symmetry.
Description
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Physical Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Physical Review Letters 96 (2006): 018305, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.018305.
Collections
Suggested Citation
Physical Review Letters 96 (2006): 018305Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
pH dependent isotropic to nematic phase transitions in graphene oxide dispersions reveal droplet liquid crystalline phases
Tkacz, Rachel; Oldenbourg, Rudolf; Mehta, Shalin B.; Miansari, Morteza; Verma, Amitabh; Majumder, Mainak (2014-05)Size fractionation, amplified by the surface charge density of graphene oxide (GO) sheets, broadens the pH dependent isotropic (I) to nematic (N) phase transition in aqueous dispersions of graphene oxide (GO). In this ... -
Ecosystem biogeochemistry considered as a distributed metabolic network ordered by maximum entropy production
Vallino, Joseph J. (2009-09-18)We examine the application of the maximum entropy production principle for describing ecosystem biogeochemistry. Since ecosystems can be functionally stable despite changes in species composition, we utilize a distributed ... -
Multichannel maximum entropy method of spectral analysis applied to offshore structures
Briggs, Michael Jeffrey (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1981-06)The multichannel Maximum Entropy Method (MEM) of spectral analysis is developed and applied in the dynamic analysis of offshore structures. Two different algorithms are implemented and compared with the conventional ...