Floppy beats rigid: MIT's bendy connectors let nanoparticles build crystals nobody has seen before

For twenty years, scientists building crystals out of nanoparticles — specks a thousand times smaller than a hair, arranged into materials with exotic properties — assumed the connectors linking them had to be rigid rods, so each particle would hold a fixed number of neighbours. A team at MIT led by Rob Macfarlane has shown the opposite works better. Their connectors are super-flexible, electrically charged molecules that bend and attract, letting researchers dial in exactly how many neighbours each nanoparticle binds to — its 'valency,' in chemistry terms. The result, reported in Nature Materials, is crystal structures never seen before, built not by forcing particles into place but by persuading them. Such designer materials could find uses in photonics (computing with light), catalysis, medicine and agriculture.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation