What is it about?
Breakfast cereals floating in a bowl of milk tend to spontaneously form two-dimensional aggregates. This is the ‘Cheerios effect’ and is due to surface tension and the cereals slightly bending the liquid surface. If instead of cereal particles, we consider particles with more complex shapes, we can begin to use particle shape to control or ‘program’ the two-dimensional structures we obtain. In this paper, we show that by using polygonal plates with wavy edges as our particles, we can vary the shape of the particles to create an essentially endless variety of two-dimensional structures.
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Why is it important?
Since we can now create complex particle shapes through technologies such as 3D printing, our research will allow us to create 2D materials with unprecedented structures or properties by design.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Programmable 2D materials through shape-controlled capillary forces, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401134121.
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