Panoscopic organization of anisotropic colloidal structures from photofunctional inorganic nanosheet liquid crystals

Colloidal liquid crystals of inorganic nanosheets with thickness of around 1 nm and lateral dimensions of several micrometers prepared by exfoliation of a layered niobate are converted to hierarchically organized arrays whose structures are controlled from the nano to macroscopic length scale through the growth of liquid crystalline domains called tactoids as the secondary building blocks followed by controlled application of external fields. Growth of the tactoids is attained by incubation of the liquid crystals at room temperature. The tactoids are then assembled into higher-order structures with characteristic lengths of sub-mm to mm under the simultaneous application of an ac electric field and gravity, whose directions determine the final textural motif of the arrays. Whereas a net-like texture is observed when applying the electric and gravitational forces in the same direction, a striped texture where the nanosheets are unidirectionally aligned is observed when the electric field is applied in the direction perpendicular to gravity. The use of well-grown tactoids is key to the macroscopic structural control. Since the niobate nanosheets have wide band-gap semiconducting nature, the nanosheet stripe arrays exhibit photocatalysis that reflected the alignment of the nanosheets with respect to the polarized direction of impinging light.