Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 38, Pages 10479-10484Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601235113
Keywords
self-assembly; ferromagnetism; nematic; colloidal dispersion
Categories
Funding
- US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering Award [ER46921]
- US National Science Foundation Grant [DMR-1120901]
- Simons Fellows grant
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The design and practical realization of composite materials that combine fluidity and different forms of ordering at the mesoscopic scale are among the grand fundamental science challenges. These composites also hold a great potential for technological applications, ranging from information displays to metamaterials. Here we introduce a fluid with coexisting polar and biaxial ordering of organic molecular and magnetic colloidal building blocks exhibiting the lowest symmetry orientational order. Guided by interactions at different length scales, rod-like organic molecules of this fluid spontaneously orient along a direction dubbed director, whereas magnetic colloidal nanoplates order with their dipole moments parallel to each other but pointing at an angle to the director, yielding macroscopic magnetization at no external fields. Facile magnetic switching of such fluids is consistent with predictions of a model based on competing actions of elastic and magnetic torques, enabling previously inaccessible control of light.
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