Science, Space and Technology News 2024
MIT engineers observed that a liquid crystal’s orderly microstructures will spontaneously assemble into large, twisted structures when the liquid is made to slowly flow. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
Chirality is everywhere in nature, from our hands to the arrangement of our internal organs to the spiral structure of. Scientists have until now assumed that chirality begets chirality — that is, chiral structures emerge from chiral forces and building blocks. But that assumption may need some retuning.engineers recently discovered that chirality can also emerge in an entirely nonchiral material, and through nonchiral means.
“This is exciting, because this gives us an easy way to structure these kinds of fluids,” says study co-author Irmgard Bischofberger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “And from a fundamental level, this is a new way in which chirality can emerge.” “I tried this experiment for the first time at home, in 2020,” Zhang recalls. “I had samples of the fluid, and a small microscope, and one day I just set it to a low flow. When I came back, I saw this really striking pattern.”
“It was surprising that it formed any structure, but even more surprising once we actually knew what type of structure it formed,” Bischofberger says. “That’s where chirality comes in.”The team discovered that the fluid’s stripes were unexpectedly chiral, by using various optical and modeling techniques to effectively retrace the fluid’s flow. They observed that, when unmoving, the fluid’s microscopic rods are normally aligned in near-perfect formation.
The researchers modeled the fluid’s dynamics and found that the large spiral patterns emerged when the fluid arrived at a balance between two forces: viscosity and elasticity. Viscosity describes how easily a material flows, while elasticity is essentially how likely a material is to deform .
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