Phase diagram and effective shape of semi-flexible colloidal rods and biopolymers

Abstract

We study suspensions of semi-flexible colloidal rods and biopolymers using an Onsager-type second-virial functional for a segmented-chain model. For suspensions of thin and thick fd virus particles we calculate phase diagrams in quantitative agreement with experimental observations, and we find their effective state-point dependent shape to be much shorter and thicker than the actual shape. We also calculate the stretching of worm-like micelles in a host fd virus solution, again finding agreement with experiments. For both systems, our results show that the fd virus stiffness can play a key role in system behavior.

10 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Elongation and fluctuations of semi-flexible polymers in a nematic solvent

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