A glass transition in suspensions of charged fibrous viruses (fd): Structural arrest and chiral texture-dynamics

We recently observed glass-like transitions in suspensions of the charged fibrous viruses (fd), which are very long (880 nm) and thin (7 nm), stiff, rod-like DNA macromolecules. These charged fibrous viruses are used as a good model system for charged colloidal rods, since they carry a large surface charge through dissociation of negatively charged coat proteins. We report here on a glass transition that leads to the structural arrest as well as freezing of a texture dynamics. For the determination of glass transition concentration, we have performed, separately, the dynamicimage time correlation spectroscopy for texture-dynamics, and dynamic light scattering to probe the structure arrest in particle-dynamics.