Strange “Black Swan” Defect Discovered in Soft Matter for First Time

Using an advanced microscopy technique, Texas A&M researchers have uncovered a twin boundary defect in a soft polymer that has never been observed before.

Texas A&M University scientists have for the first time revealed a single microscopic defect called a “twin” in a soft-block copolymer using an advanced electron microscopy technique. This defect may be exploited in the future to create materials with novel acoustic and photonic properties.

“This defect is like a black swan — something special going on that isn’t typical,” said Edwin Thomas, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Although we chose a certain polymer for our study, I think the twin defect will be fairly universal across a bunch of similar soft matter systems, like oils, surfactants, biological materials, and natural polymers. Therefore, our findings will be valuable to diverse research across the soft matter field.”

Materials can be broadly classified as hard or soft matter. Hard materials, like metal alloys and ceramics, generally have a very regular and symmetric arrangement of atoms. Further, in hard matter, ordered groups of atoms arrange themselves into nanoscopic building blocks called unit cells. Typically, these unit cells are comprised of only a few atoms and stack together to form the periodic crystal. Soft matter can also form crystals consisting of unit cells, but now the periodic pattern is not at the atomic level; it occurs at a much larger scale from assemblies of large molecules.

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