this might look like a simple Glass Lens but unlike conventional glass this lens can heal itself if cracked that's because like human hair or muscle it's made from amino acids the building blocks of [Music] life peptides are chains of amino acids like smaller versions of proteins and they make for attractive chemical building blocks due to their ability to self assemble into structures with unique properties in nature this could mean hormones like insulin but researchers have also used peptides to make new materials like nanot tubes and 3D scaffolds the problem is that these structures tend to
be crystalline no good if you need a glassy material glass needs a liquidlike structure without the regular periodic pattern of a crystal to achieve this for conventional glass requires melting and rapid cooling that locks in the glassy structure before crystals can form but this peptide is different dissolve it in water and it can spontaneously assemble into a rigid glass this works as the water forms Bridges between the peptide molecules stabilizing the amorphous structure this spontaneous glass formation is so unexpected it even surprised the researchers who were originally studying something else the peptide glass is transparent
across visible and infrared wavelengths of light and has a refractive index close to that of commonly used optical glasses and it has a natural tendency to form curved shapes in the manufacturing process as the water in the solution evaporates and that makes it easy to form into convex lenses by adjusting the solution volume the team could create different curvatures and thus different focal lens the peptide glass also has some surprising properties it's a strong adhesive that's because the intermolecular hydrogen bond interactions that give rise to its structure also allow it to adhere to water loving
surfaces the team used it to glue two microscope slides together and found they remained connected even under a 5 kg load and unlike conventional glass you can modify how brittle the peptide glasses by adding or removing water dehydrate it enough and the glass will crack but this allows a demonstration of another of its unexpected abilities leave the cracked glass in a moist environment and it can heal itself leaving no trace of the damage a recy cable self-healing optically transparent glass that can also act as a glue pretty nifty this glass could go on to have
applications across Optical and electrooptical Manufacturing meanwhile the team are moving on to look for other peptides that could spontaneously assemble into glass something that previously would have been unfathomable
