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Self-Assembly, Condensation, And Order In Aqueous Lyotropic Chromonic Liquid Crystals Crowded With Additives, Luana Tortora, Heung-Shik Park, Shin-Woong Kang, Victoria Savaryn, Seung-Ho Hong, Konstantine Kaznatcheev, Daniele Finotello, Samuel Sprunt, Satyendra Kumar, Oleg Lavrentovich
Self-Assembly, Condensation, And Order In Aqueous Lyotropic Chromonic Liquid Crystals Crowded With Additives, Luana Tortora, Heung-Shik Park, Shin-Woong Kang, Victoria Savaryn, Seung-Ho Hong, Konstantine Kaznatcheev, Daniele Finotello, Samuel Sprunt, Satyendra Kumar, Oleg Lavrentovich
Oleg Lavrentovich
Dense multicomponent systems with macromolecules and small solutes attract a broad research interest as they mimic the molecularly crowded cellular interiors. The additives can condense and align the macromolecules, but they do not change the degree of covalentpolymerization. We chose a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal with reversibly and non-covalently assembled aggregates as a much softer system, reminiscent of “living polymers”, to demonstrate that small neutral and charged additives cause condensation of aggregates with ensuing orientational and positional ordering and nontrivial morphologies of phase separation, such as tactoids and toroids of the nematic and hexagonal columnar phase coexisting with the isotropic …