Lyotropic Nematic Phases of Isotropic Nanoparticles via Semiflexible Polymer Ligands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lyotropic liquid crystalline (LC) nanomaterials are normally achieved through particle shape anisotropy. Herein, it is shown that lyotropic nematic rather than cubic phases are produced from spherical nanoparticles (NPs) with semi‐flexible polymer ligands. ZrO 2 nanocrystals (4 nm dia.) are coated with a dense shell of poly(hexyl isocyanate) (PHIC), a helical rod‐like polymer that forms lyotropic LC phases in a range of organic solvents. Solvent casted NPs with PHIC ligands above the persistence length form linear assemblies, separated by a characteristic distance related to the chain length while NPs with shorter, rigid rod PHIC ligands pack hexagonally. Concentrated NP‐PHIC dispersions present nematic textures similar to the free PHIC nematic solutions but at lower critical concentrations, widening the isotropic‐nematic biphasic region. 2 H NMR spectra of the NPs dispersed in a deuterated solvent display quadrupolar splittings that increase with NP concentration, showing that the PHIC ligands are magnetically aligned. The high degree of orientation order is evidence that splaying of the ligand shell transforms the spherical NPs to rod‐like shapes that assemble to produce nematic lyotropic LC phases and linear NP arrays. This approach to creating anisotropic assemblies can be extended to other types of spherical NPs and semiflexible polymers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".