It’s a puddle you can poke. A new material that appears to be an ordinary liquid, but can be shaped, moulded and sliced like Play-Doh or plasticine, could be used to make novel lenses or mini-containers for chemical reactions.
The material, developed by Xiaoguang Li of Tongji University in Shanghai, China, and his colleagues, relies on an extension of a technique for stabilising droplets as liquid marbles. These are water droplets coated in a hydrophobic powder, which holds the liquid in place.
Surface tension makes the marbles spherical, and they are basically opaque because of the powder coating. Li wanted to remove both these restrictions to create a transparent liquid object that can take any shape.
To do so, the team dried a silica-based gel on glass slides, creating layers of 20-nanometre silica particles. Putting water droplets on top coated them in just a single layer of silica. “The particles on the droplet surface basically form a monolayer. Therefore the droplet is as transparent as a pure liquid,” says Li.
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