17.07.2009
Surprisingly, spatially nano-confined liquid n-hexane is still an isotropic liquid: We did not find any hints of collective orientational order as a function of filling of glass capillaries with 7 nm mean diameter and 400 micrometer length. A combined optical birefringence/vapour sorption isotherm study reporting this message was published in Physical Review B today. The absence of any orientational order in the confined liquid state highlights the importance of an anisotropic crystallization process named after Percy W. Bridgman (a Harvard scholar and Nobel Laureate) for the occurence of preferred orientations upon solidification of n-hexane and medium-length n-alkanes in nanochannels of mesoporous silicon.