The angular optical response of cellulose nanocrystal films explained by the distortion of the arrested suspension upon drying.

ABSTRACT: Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are bio-sourced chiral nanorods that can form stable colloidal suspensions able to spontaneously assemble above a critical concentration into a cholesteric liquid crystal, with a cholesteric pitch usually in the micron range. When these suspensions are dried on a substrate, solid films with a pitch of the order of few hundreds of nanometers can be produced, leading to intense reflection in the visible range. However, the resulting cholesteric nanostructure is usually not homogeneous within a sample and comports important variations of the cholesteric domain orientation and pitch, which affect the photonic properties. In this work, we first propose a model accounting for the formation of the photonic structure from the vertical compression of the cholesteric su

SUBMITTER: Frka-Petesic B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7116400 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature