Scientists have developed a new family of materials that can emit light in tightly controlled colors, and could have promising applications in detecting chemical and biological compounds or mechanical and thermal conditions.
The new material is a metallic polymer gel created from rare Earth elements, MIT reported. The gel can be chemically tuned to emit light in response to a variety of triggers, including chemical, mechanical, and thermal stimuli.
To create these promising new materials, a metal from the lanthanide group is combined with a popular polymer called polyethylene glycol (PEG). The resulting material produces tunable, multicolored light emissions that can reflect extremely subtle environmental changes.
"It's super-sensitive to external parameters," said study leader and assistant professor of materials science and engineering Niels Holten-Andersen. "Whatever you do will change the bond dynamics, which will change the color."
The materials could be put to use detecting "pollutants, toxins, or pathogens," and providing simple color-coded results. The materials can also be used to detect mechanical changes, such as stress in a mechanical system, or measure the force of fluids. The new material was inspired in-part by biological materials found in nature, such as rare-Earth elements.
"My niche is biomimetics -- using nature's tricks to design bio-inspired polymers," said Niels Holten-Andersen. "[There are an amazing variety] of 'really funky' organisms in the ocean. We've barely scratched the surface of trying to understand how they're put together, from a chemical and mechanical standpoint."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
