Researchers from Tel Aviv University have for the first time created glass that knows how to repair itself and is formed spontaneously by simple contact with water
Forget the glass we've known until now: researchers from Tel Aviv University have created a new type of revolutionary glass with unique properties. It forms spontaneously in contact with water at room temperature, is very sticky yet incredibly transparent, and can even nurse itself if broken. According to the research team, the new glass may revolutionize different and diverse industries such as optics and electro-optics, satellite communication, remote sensing and biomedicine. And what does this mean for us? Maybe we won't be heartbroken anymore if the glasses or phone screen shatters.
Break the glass ceiling
Behind the discovery stands a distinguished line of female researchers from Israel and the world, led by doctoral student Gal Finkelstein-Zota, Dr. Zohar Arnon and Prof. Ehud Gazit from the school For biomedical research and cancer research by Shmunis in the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering At the Ivy and Eldar Fleishman Faculty of Engineering, at Tel Aviv University.
The new glass was discovered by chance, when the team was engaged in research on a small molecule (peptide), which consists of tyrosine - one of the twenty amino acids that make up all the proteins in the human body. The results of the research were recently published in the world's most prestigious journal: Nature.
"In our laboratory we are engaged in bio-convergence, (a multidisciplinary field of developing new technologies that combines biology with the fields of engineering, and aims to respond to unsolved challenges in the fields of medicine, agriculture, food, energy and security), and specifically we use the wonderful properties of biology to to produce innovative materials," explains Prof. Gazit. "Among other things, we study sequences of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Amino acids and peptides have a natural tendency to connect with each other and form ordered structures with a defined cycle, but during the research we discovered a unique peptide that behaves differently from anything we know: it is not He created an orderly but amorphous sequence, without order, that describes glass."
At the molecular level, glass is a liquid-like substance, without order in its molecular structure, but its mechanical properties are solid-like. The glass is created by rapidly cooling molten materials and "freezing" them in this state before they have time to crystallize, an amorphous state that gives it unique optical, chemical and mechanical properties, along with durability, versatility and sustainability. The research team from Tel Aviv University discovered that the aromatic peptide consisting of a sequence of three tyrosines (YYY) forms molecular glass spontaneously, in contact with water, under room conditions.
"Like making raspberry juice"
"The normal glass we all know is created by very fast cooling of molten materials," says Finkelstein-Zotta. "You have to freeze and fix the material before it settles in a more energy-efficient way, and for that you have to invest energy: heat it to high temperatures and cool it immediately. The glass we made is made of biological building blocks, and it forms spontaneously at room temperature, without the investment of energy such as heat or high pressure Just dissolve the powder in plain water, like making raspberry juice." Gal tells how lenses were created in the laboratory easily and quickly: "Instead of a lengthy process of grinding and polishing, we simply dripped a drop onto a surface and created a lens, where we control its curvature - and hence its focus - using only the volume of the solution."
The properties of the innovative glass are unique in the world and even contradict each other. The new glass has a high hardness, but it can repair itself at room temperature; It is very sticky, and at the same time it is transparent in a wide spectral range ranging from the visible light range to the mid-infrared range, which increases the variety of uses that can be made of it.
"This is the first time that we have succeeded in creating molecular glass under mild conditions," says Prof. Gazit, "but no less important than that are the properties of the glass we created. This is a very special glass. On the one hand, it is very strong and on the other hand, very transparent, much more than the usual silicate glass that we all you know, which is of course transparent in the visible light range, but the molecular glass we created is also transparent deep into the infrared range", according to Prof. Gazit, there This has diverse uses in many fields, including satellites, remote sensing, communication and optics. "We already have a collaboration with the Israeli company Al-Op, which manufactures electro-optical systems. Thanks to its adhesive property, our glass can glue together different glasses, and at the same time it can repair cracks that are formed in it by itself. This is a set of properties that does not exist in any glass in the world , which has great potential in science and engineering, and we got all of this from a peptide - a small piece of protein."
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