Elastic response of colloidal smectics: insights from microscopic theory

Abstract

Elongated colloidal rods at sufficient packing conditions are known to form stable lamellar or smectic phases. Using a simplified volume-exclusion model, we propose a generic equation-of-state for hard-rod smectics that is robust against simulation results and is independent of the rod aspect ratio. We then extend our theory by exploring the elastic properties of a hard-rod smectic, including the layer compressibility ($B$) and bending modulus ($K_{1}$). By introducing weak backbone flexibility we are able to compare our predictions with experimental results on smectics of filamentous virus rods and find quantitative agreement between the smectic layer spacing, the out-of-plane fluctuation strength, as well as the smectic penetration length $\lambda = \sqrt{K_{1}/B}$. We demonstrate that the layer bending modulus is dominated by director splay and depends sensitively on lamellar out-of-plane fluctuations that we account for on the single-rod level. We find that the ratio between the smectic penetration length and the lamellar spacing is about two orders of magnitude smaller than typical values reported for thermotropic smectics. We attribute this to the fact that colloidal smectics are considerably softer in terms of layer compression than their thermotropic counterparts while the cost of layer bending is of comparable magnitude.