Research by PME Professor Juan de Pablo and Professor Nicholas Abbott of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been featured on the cover of the January 2016 issue of Nature Materials.
Although topological defects in liquid crystals have been commonly used for many purposes, such as organizing colloidal dispersions and template polymerization, there has not been much insight as to how molecular-level assembly processes occur within these defects. However, de Pablo and Abbott have now reported that the topological defects in liquid crystals can actually create a type of nanoscale environment that acts as a template for the self-assembly of molecular amphiphiles within the defects themselves.
They employ fluorescence microscopy, cryogenic transmission electron microscopy, and super-resolution microscopy to observe the self-assembly of amphilphilic molecules, illustrating the great versatility of these templates in the context of molecular self-assembly. The work has tremendous implications for the creation and assembly of new and complex shapes of molecules and nanoparticles, such as defect knots around spherical colloids, self-linking defect wires around colloids with holes, and a self-assembled split-ring resonator out of topological liquid crystal defects.