Aakash Sharma, Margarita Kruteva, Michaela Zamponi, Sascha Ehlert, Dieter Richter, and Stephan Förster
Phys. Rev. Materials 6, L012601 (2022) – Published 25 January, 2022
Editors from Physical Review Letters, Physical Review Applied, and Physical Review Materials have gathered several recently published papers in soft matter and polymer research in an effort to illustrate the kind of papers these journals are looking for in this topic.
Experiments and simulations explain the unusual nature of the structure’s springiness.
Corrugations strongly affect the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional materials, and could be used to develop e.g. ultrathin pressure sensors, electronic waveguides, or hydrogen-storage devices. That requires fine control of the structure and geometry of the wrinkles, and thus a reliable and flexible method to generate them. This work shows how polymeric microactuators can be used to induce ordered arrays of wrinkles on graphene. Moreover, its proof-of-concept experiment demonstrates the potential of mechanical actuators to tune the corrugation of other two-dimensional materials as well.
The shells of some mollusk species have compact helical structures that researchers propose develop from the self-assembly of a liquid-crystalline material.
An algorithm that already predicts how proteins fold might also shed light on the physical principles that dictate this folding.
