English

Chiral edge fluctuations of colloidal membranes

Soft Condensed Matter 2017-07-05 v1

Abstract

We study edge fluctuations of a flat colloidal membrane comprised of a monolayer of aligned filamentous viruses. Experiments reveal that a peak in the spectrum of the in-plane edge fluctuations arises for sufficiently strong virus chirality. Accounting for internal liquid crystalline degrees of freedom by the length, curvature, and geodesic torsion of the edge, we calculate the spectrum of the edge fluctuations. The theory quantitatively describes the experimental data, demonstrating that chirality couples in-plane and out-of-plane edge fluctuations to produce the peak.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.03244,
  title  = {Chiral edge fluctuations of colloidal membranes},
  author = {Leroy L. Jia and Mark J. Zakhary and Zvonimir Dogic and Robert A. Pelcovits and Thomas R. Powers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.03244},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Main text: 4 pages, 2 figures. Supplementary materials: 3 videos