Chiral edge fluctuations of colloidal membranes

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.

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

References in corpus (2)

• Entropic forces stabilize diverse emergent structures in colloidal membranes
• Concise theory of chiral lipid membranes

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Force induced formation of twisted chiral ribbons
• Deformation and orientational order of chiral membranes with free edges
• Shapes of fluid membranes with chiral edges
• Elastic moduli of a smectic membrane: a rod-level scaling analysis
• Controlling the shape and topology of two-component colloidal membranes