2004/01/12 by Z. Dogic, J. Zhang, A. W. C. Lau +7
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.92.125503
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 (2004) 125503 · 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PRL
arxiv created 2004/01/12 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We directly visualize single polymers with persistence lengths ranging from ℓp=0.05 to 16 μm, dissolved in the nematic phase of rod-like \it fd virus. Polymers with 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 semi-flexible polymers and show that at long wavelengths they are driven by the fluctuating nematic background. We extract both the Odijk deflection length and the elastic constant of the background nematic phase from the data.