The nature of the assembly process in chromonic liquid crystals

Chromonic liquid crystals form when certain molecules are dissolved in a solvent, usually water, and the molecules spontaneously assemble into anisotropic structures. If the density of these structures is high enough and the temperature is low enough, they organize into a liquid crystal phase with orientational and sometimes with positional order also. Chromonic liquid crystals have been studied for more than half a century, yet theoretical, computational, and experimental investigations in the last decade have revealed many more details about them. The molecular structures that form chromonic liquid crystals are quite varied, and as a result the assemblies that these molecules form vary significantly also. Recent research has begun to shed light on these assembly processes, revealing that these too can be quite different from one system to another.