The effects of the anionic azo dye Sunset Yellow on the stabilization of lyotropic uniaxial and biaxial nematic phases and on the uniaxial to biaxial phase transitions were studied. The dye was added in different concentrations to the host ternary mixture of cationic surfactant dodecyltrimethylammonium bromide, 1-dodecanol, and water. Furthermore, an investigation examined the role of the dye in the lyotropic host mixture in comparison to some inorganic salts containing anions of the Hofmeister series.
Lyotropic liquid crystals exhibiting nematic phases were obtained from the mixtures potassium laurate/alkali sulfate salts (M2SO4)/1-undecanol (UndeOH)/water and sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)/M2SO4/1-dodecanol (DDeOH)/water, where M2SO4 represents the alkali sulfate salts being Li2SO4, Na2SO4, K2SO4, Rb2SO4 or Cs2SO4. The birefringences measurements were performed via laser conoscopy. Our results indicated that cosmotropic and chaotropic behaviors of both ions and head groups are very important to obtain lyotropic biaxial nematic phase. To obtain the biaxial nematic phase, surfactant head group and ion present in lyotropic mixture have relatively opposite behavior, e.g. one more cosmotropic (more chaotropic) other less cosmotropic (less chaotropic) or vice versa.
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