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Materials

Materials

New auxetic material stretches the limits

08 Oct 2020
Taken from the October 2020 issue of Physics World, where it appeared under the headline "Stretching the limits".

Most materials get thinner when stretched, but “auxetics” do the opposite and get thicker. Helen Gleeson describes her group’s discovery of a material that is auxetic at the molecular level, which could be used in everything from body armour to laminated glass

Helen Gleeson with her former PhD student Devesh Mistry
Material magic Helen Gleeson with her former PhD student Devesh Mistry, who discovered auxetic behaviour in a liquid-crystal elastomer. Mistry used a specially designed set-up that could fit on the stage of a polarizing microscope (pictured) to test the mechanical properties of the material. (Courtesy: University of Leeds)
Take a rubber band, stretch it along its length, and it will shrink in the other two directions, get

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Helen Gleeson is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds, UK, e-mail h.f.gleeson@leeds.ac.uk
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