U.S.-Netherlands Cooperative Research on Colloids and Liquid Crystals

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This award supports Professors Robert Meyer and Seth Fraden and some graduate students of Brandeis University to collaborate in studies of colloids and liquid crystals with Professor H. N. W. Lekkerkerker and his group of the Chemistry Department of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The two groups have complementary expertise in the field of liquid crystals (U.S. side) and colloids (Dutch side) and have overlapping interests in the area of colloids which form liquid crystals. Joint research will be carried out on specialized materials on which each of the laboratories is expert, in order to advance understanding of these important systems. For example, the Brandeis group has been working recently on filamentous bacteriophage viruses that are susceptible to magnetic field induced ordering. The Utrecht group has been able to synthesize rod-like colloidal particles of the crystal Boehmite, and has developed expertise in preparing colloidal particles with specialized organic coatings. These lines of research come together in the current collaboration in studies of rod-like colloidal particles which form ordered states in suspension in a liquid. The collaborators will experimentally control the properties of the colloidal particles and their interaction, and will make a detailed theoretical analysis of the systems. The topic of colloids and liquid crystals is one of increasing importance, as the field of complex fluids and their applications grow. As well as being interesting in their own right, and the basis of many important applications in technology and industry, these colloidal systems serve as model systems for testing fundamental ideas about many other important physical systems.