Liquid crystalline nanoparticles

Self-assembly of nanoparticles into organized structures with various properties has been a topic of research for a long time. One of the ways to efficiently prepare and manipulate such nanosystems is to use liquid crystal molecules and chemically attach them to the nanoparticle surface. The advantage of using mesogenic molecules as surface ligands is to control the distance between the nanoparticles and at the same time preserve liquid crystalline ordering. Furthermore liquid crystalline medium is sensitive to small external stimuli therefore the nanoparticles organization can be dynamically tuned. Especially interesting and most commonly used are metal nanoparticles due to their collective plasmonic properties.
In this talk I am going to present our research efforts in this field. In our study we prepared silver nanoparticles and covered them with liquid crystalline ligands based on lactic acid derivatives. We characterized the prepared systems using various experimental methods and proposed a model for the observed superstructures.