Estudo das propriedades ópticas e de transporte térmico do ouro coloidal em cristais líquidos liotrópicos

Abstract

The optical properties as well as thermal transport nanoparticles attract great attention due to the possibilities of applications and research in basic physics. Among the most studied systems are gold nanoparticles by presenting a plasmon resonance frequency in the visible wavelength. However, the manner in which generate heat when excited optically and how the surface plasmon can be used as a probe medium in which the particles are dispersed have been little explored. In this work we present an experimental study of the thermal lens effect of lyotropic liquid crystals doped with gold nanoparticles, under cw 532 nm optical excitation, and a study of how the surface plasmon resonance of colloidal gold can probe the local ordering of a anisotropic media. Spherical gold nanoparticles of approximately 12 nm were synthesized by the Turkevich’s method and the two lyotropic liquid crystals were prepared with a ternary mixture of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and potassium laurate (KL) with 1-decanol (1-DeOH ) and water. The lyotropic matrix with SDS induced the formation of nanoparticle aggregates, leading to a broad and a red shift of the plasmon resonance band. The nonlinear refraction index of thermal origin increases as a power law with respect to particle density, being possible to adress this behavior with the presence of nanopaticles clusters. In the case of liquid crystal composed of KL, we studied the reentrant isotropic - nematic calamitic - isotropic phase transitions, monitoring the plasmon resonance of the nanoparticles. For transitions at low temperatures, isotropic reentrant to nematic, the resonance band has a red-shift of 7 nm which can be assigned mainly with the increase of the dielectric constant due to a change in the shape anisotropy of the micelles. On the other hand, in the high temperature transition, the maximum absorption wavelength suffer a slight extra red-shift which may be due to a small change in the correlation length.