Institute for Medicine and Engineering Papers
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
3-26-2004
Abstract
We directly visualize single polymers with persistence lengths ranging from lp = 0:05 to 16 µm, dissolved in the nematic phase of rod-like 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.
COinS
Date Posted: 30 July 2007
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Copyright American Physical Society. Reprinted from Physical Review Letters, Volume 92, Number 12, March 2004, 4 pages.
Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.125503