In:
Scientific Reports, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, Vol. 7, No. 1 ( 2017-07-10)
Kurzfassung:
Throughout the whole history of liquid crystals science, the balancing of intrinsic elasticity with coupling to external forces has been the key strategy for most application and investigation. While the coupling of the optical field to the nematic director is at the base of a wealth of thoroughly described optical effects, a significant variety of geometries and materials have not been considered yet. Here we show that by adopting a simple cell geometry and measuring the optically induced birefringence, we can readily extract the twist elastic coefficient K 22 of thermotropic and lyotropic chiral nematics (N*). The value of K 22 we obtain for chiral doped 5CB thermotropic N* well matches those reported in the literature. With this same strategy, we could determine for the first time K 22 of the N* phase of concentrated aqueous solutions of DNA oligomers, bypassing the limitations that so far prevented measuring the elastic constants of this class of liquid crystalline materials. The present study also enlightens the significant nonlinear optical response of DNA liquid crystals.
Materialart:
Online-Ressource
ISSN:
2045-2322
DOI:
10.1038/s41598-017-05136-z
Sprache:
Englisch
Verlag:
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Publikationsdatum:
2017
ZDB Id:
2615211-3
