Fine Golden Rings: Tunable Surface Plasmon Resonance from Assembled Nanorods in Topological Defects of Liquid Crystals.

Unprecedented, reversible, and dynamic control over an assembly of gold nanorods dispersed in liquid crystals (LC) is demonstrated. The LC director field is dynamically tuned at the nanoscale using microscale ring confinement through the interplay of elastic energy at different temperatures, thus fine-tuning its core replacement energy to reversibly sequester nanoscale inclusions at the microscale. This leads to shifts of 100 nm or more in the surface plasmon resonance peak, an order of magnitude greater than any previous work with AuNR composites.