Engineered Anisotropic Fluids of Rare-Earth Nanomaterials

Baiqi Shao; Sikang Wan; Chenjing Yang; Jianlei Shen; Yiwen Li; Hongpeng You; Dong Chen; Chunhai Fan; Kai Liu; Hongjie Zhang

doi:10.1002/anie.202007676

Engineered Anisotropic Fluids of Rare-Earth Nanomaterials

Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2020 Oct 5;59(41):18213-18217. doi: 10.1002/anie.202007676. Epub 2020 Aug 18.

Authors

Baiqi Shao¹, Sikang Wan^{1

2}, Chenjing Yang³, Jianlei Shen⁴, Yiwen Li⁵, Hongpeng You^{1

2}, Dong Chen³, Chunhai Fan⁴, Kai Liu^{1

6

2}, Hongjie Zhang^{1

6

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resource Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130022, China.
² University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China.
³ Institute of Process Equipment, College of Energy Engineering and State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China.
⁴ Frontiers Science Center for Transformative Molecules, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.
⁵ National Center for Protein Science Shanghai, Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201210, China.
⁶ Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.

PMID: 32634255
DOI: 10.1002/anie.202007676

Abstract

The self-assembly of inorganic nanoparticles into well-ordered structures in the absence of solvents is generally hindered by van der Waals forces, leading to random aggregates between them. To address the problem, we functionalized rigid rare-earth (RE) nanoparticles with a layer of flexible polymers by electrostatic complexation. Consequently, an ordered and solvent-free liquid crystal (LC) state of RE nanoparticles was realized. The RE nanomaterials including nanospheres, nanorods, nanodiscs, microprisms, and nanowires all show a typical nematic LC phase with one-dimensional orientational order, while their microstructures strongly depend on the particles' shape and size. Interestingly, the solvent-free thermotropic LCs possess an extremely wide temperature range from -40 °C to 200 °C. The intrinsic ordering and fluidity endow anisotropic luminescence properties in the system of shearing-aligned RE LCs, offering potential applications in anisotropic optical micro-devices.

Keywords: anisotropic luminescence; nanoengineering; rare-earth materials; self-assembly; thermotropic liquid crystals.

Grants and funding

21834007/National Natural Science Foundation of China