Micron-sized "bow ties," self-assembled from nanoparticles, form a variety of different curling shapes that can be precisely controlled, a research team led by the University of Michigan has shown.
The development opens the way for easily producing materials that interact with twisted light, providing new tools for machine vision and producing medicines.
While biology is full of twisted structures like DNA, known as chiral structures, the degree of twist is locked in—trying to change it breaks the structure. Now, researchers can engineer the degree of twist.
Such materials could enable robots to accurately navigate complex human environments. Twisted structures would encode information in the shapes of the light waves that reflect from the surface, rather than in the 2D arrangement of symbols that comprises most human-read signs. This would take advantage of an aspect of light that humans can barely sense, known as polarization. The twisted nanostructures preferentially reflect certain kinds of circularly polarized light, a shape that twists as it moves through space.
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