title: Director orientations in lyotropic liquid crystals: diffusion MRI mapping of the Saupe order tensor.
abstract: The macroscopic physical properties of a liquid crystalline material depend on both the properties of the individual crystallites and the details of their spatial arrangement. We propose a diffusion MRI method to estimate the director orientations of a lyotropic liquid crystal as a spatially resolved field of Saupe order tensors. The method relies on varying the shape of the diffusion-encoding tensor to disentangle the effects of voxel-scale director orientational order and the local diffusion anisotropy of the solvent. Proof-of-concept experiments are performed on water in lamellar and reverse hexagonal liquid crystalline systems with intricate patterns of director orientations.
authors.affiliation: Division of Physical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. daniel.topgaard@fkem1.lu.se.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Topgaard