Self-Assembly of Colloidal Membranes

Symmetric monolayer membranes are observed to self-assemble in a colloidal suspension of hard rods with soft attractions. This attractive component to the interaction is enough to drive the self-assembly of stable two dimensional fluid-like surfaces of rods. Simultaneous measurements are made at both the molecular, via direct imaging of individual fluorescently labeled particles, and the continuum length scales. At the continuum scale, the elastic Hamiltonian for a two dimensional fluid-like surface is verified for a symmetric monolayer, and measured material constants such as the bending modulus and the area compression modulus are demonstrated to obey a simple elastic relationship.