Figure 4
From: Continuous Isotropic-Nematic Transition in Amyloid Fibril Suspensions Driven by Thermophoresis
Direct observation of the I + N biphasic phase under microscopic polarized light. (a) Overall schematic of the cell used to record birefringence images and its temperature control through the use of two Peltier modules. (b) Enlargement of the microfluidic cell (not to scale). A thin glass cover slip placed perpendicular to the microfluidic cell permits optimized horizontal microscopic imaging under polarized light conditions; the thickness of the cell is 150 µm. (c) Birefringence that provides evidence of the simultaneous I and N phase presence at steady-state (t = 240 min) compared to initial conditions (t = 0) at which only N is present. Static spurious contributions coming from the PDMS device have been removed by applying a bandpass filter via FFT to the images in panel c via FIJI software. Nonetheless, a background signal is still present as evidenced by the fact that we still detect a non-zero signal on the cold (I phase) side of the channel (see Fig. 4d and Fig. S4). (d) Time evolution of the normalised birefringent intensity profile across the microchannel: from a uniform birefringent profile an I to N continuous profile appears over time.
