Nano-Architecture of Self-Assembled Monolayer and Multilayer Stacks of Lyotropic Chromonic Liquid Crystalline Dyes

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mesomorphic state of the lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) materials allows one to prepare mono- and multimolecular thin films with a distinct feature of a long-range orientational order in the plane of the film that makes the dried LCLC films drastically different from the classic Langmuir-Blodgett surfactant films. The thin (1–10 nanometers) LCLC films are deposited by the electrostatic layer-by-layer technique, with alternating monolayers of LCLC and oppositely charged polyions. In this work, we report on a new scheme of electrostatic layer-by-layer deposition, in which the passive polyion layers are eliminated: The film is deposited by alternating positively and negatively charged homologs of a LCLC material with the same molecular core structure. The assembled dried films demonstrate long-range orientational order as evidenced by the measurements of absorption and dichroic ratio as a function of the angle between the deposition direction and polarization of probing light.