Physicists Reveal a New Type of Twisting Solid That Behaves Almost Like a Living Material

A wonderful new class of solids composed of spinning particles that exhibit bizarre, lifelike properties has been created by physicists. These “rotating crystals” substances made from numerous particles interacting not by transmitted forces but those acting sideways rather than head on, can twist instead of stretch, shatter while in motion and even reassemble into cohesive wholes. The team of researchers from Aachen, Düsseldorf and Mainz (Germany), together with Wayne State University (Detroit, USA), introduces a comprehensive theoretical concept to predict novel characteristics of systems like these, so-called transverse--interaction systems.

“Rotating Crystals” – Solids That Twist, Break, and Rebuild Themselves

As per Science Daily, these crystals are prone to cleaving easily into individual fragments, impurity grain boundaries and can reveal controllable defects in the structure. They used a multiscale theoretical model to examine how multiple rotating building blocks can couple and lead to behaviour that is qualitatively new and counterintuitive.

New Physics Behind Transverse Interactions and Odd Elasticity Revealed

In ordinary matter, you pull a solid, and the force causes stretching in the direction that's being pulled. On the other hand, an odd elastic material may not stretch in the usual manner but twist under tension. When the spinning building blocks rub against each other with sufficient force, they cause the solid to break into lots of smaller crystallites.

Moreover, they discovered that large crystals dominated by the transverse interaction will tend to fragment into smaller spinning crystals, while small ones grow until they reach a critical size. This is opposite to how normal crystal growth occurs - the crystal grows steadily under good conditions.

The generation of defects in such crystals can be controlled from outside, enabling precise tuning of crystal properties with an eye on applications in areas as diverse as colloid science and biology.