Effects of confinement on liquid-crystalline ordering in wormlike polymers

I have recently begun studying, in collaboration with Professor Jeff Chen of the University of Waterloo, the physical properties of "wormlike" polymers confined between two flat surfaces (see picture below). This is relevant to several systems of confined biological molecules, such as DNA confined in so-called viral capsids or within the nucleus of a cell. The wormlike model used is closely related to that considered in topic (4) earlier. Our initial work has focussed on showing that such a system can exhibit three different types of orientational phases - called "uniaxial", "biaxial" and "condensed" (found earlier in studies of rigid-rod systems) (see details1,2) - as well as on a free-energy scaling theory (see details). In future work, we will examine in more detail the conformational properties of the system.