We study elasticity-mediated alignment of anisotropic gold colloids in liquid crystals. Colloidal gold particles of controlled shapes (spheres, rods, and polygonal platelets) and sizes are prepared using well-established biosynthesis techniques with varying solvent conditions. When introduced into liquid crystalline structured solvents, these gold particles impose tangential or vertical surface boundary conditions for the liquid crystal molecules or building blocks such as chromonic molecular aggregates. This allows for multiple types of their controlled alignment in both lyotropic and thermotropic liquid crystals and is of interest for self-assembly-based fabrication of tunable nanostructured composite materials.
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Evans et al. (2011) studied this question.
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