Toward a Tetravalent Chemistry of Colloids

By D. Nelson. 2002

291 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose coating spherical particles or droplets with anisotropic nanosized objects to allow micron-scale colloids to link or functionalize with a 4-fold valence, similar to the sp3 hybridized chemical bonds associated with, e.g., carbon, silicon, and germanium. Candidates for such coatings include triblock copolymers, gemini lipids, metallic or semiconducting nanorods, and conventional liquid crystal compounds. We estimate the size of the relevant nematic Frank constants, discuss how to obtain other valences and analyze the thermal distortions of ground-state configurations of defects on the sphere.

Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4797f8f38be8aae152c0eb704e560c19a76944e3

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In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Materials Chemistry

In Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

A new era for liquid crystal research: Applications of liquid crystals in soft matter nano-, bio- and microtechnology (2012, methodology): “The work in this new field has largely been motivated by a seminal theoretical paper by David Nelson, published in Nano Letters in 2002 [242].”
Drops and shells of liquid crystal (2011, methodology): “The ground state predicted by theory incorporates four s=+1/2 defects at the vertices of a tetrahedron (taken from [36]).”
Topological active matter (2020, background): “In equilibrium, for equal bend and splay elastic constants , the configuration lowest in energy corresponds to four +1/2 defects located at the corner of a tetrahedron inscribed by the sphere 130,131 .”
Frustrated nematic order in spherical geometries (2011, background): “One way to address this is to coat spherical colloid particles with a thin layer of nematic liquid crysta”