Liquid Crystals: Alignment and Graphene-Assisted Decoration of Lyotropic Chromonic Liquid Crystals Containing DNA Origami Nanostructures (Small 12/2016)

On page 1658, H. Kitzerow and co-workers show that stable dispersion of the nanostructures in a liquid crystal and uniform alignment of the resulting composite are possible. DNA origami nanostructures decorated with gold nanoparticles (inset: TEM image) are dispersed in a uniformly aligned liquid crystal (background: image observed by polarizing microscopy). The unusual optical properties of such plasmonic nanostructures – for example a large circular dichroism in the case of the nanohelix – are expected to be enhanced if the nanostructures are uniformly aligned.