A strange and fiendishly difficult-to-create material known as 鈥減lumber鈥檚 nightmare鈥� has been made from tiny, intertwined tubes. Though the substance itself isn鈥檛 especially useful, the technique needed to produce it could be used to build other hard-to-make materials.
Plumber鈥檚 nightmare consists of a pattern of six intersecting tubes, meaning that a sample contains many tubes connecting and intersecting in complex ways. The material was first theorised 20 years ago and has previously been made from soap-like molecules in water, but never from a solid material.
at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea and her colleagues have worked out a way to better control the mixing of plastic-like materials called polymers, which allowed them to turn them into plumber鈥檚 nightmare.
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The researchers started with many long, chain-shaped molecules made from the polymers polystyrene and polyethylene oxide, which are both derived from petroleum and similar to plastic. They then modified the ends of each chain so that they would connect to each other in new ways and assemble into shapes that they do not form naturally. Some of those shapes turned out to be plumber鈥檚 nightmare.
Plumber鈥檚 nightmare has never been created in a polymer experiment before, and all structures that are similarly intertwined show up very rarely in the lab, says at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Now that the team has found a recipe for making them, other rare and unexpected or new polymer structures could be discovered by trying it with different ingredients, he says.
at McMaster University in Canada says that the team鈥檚 method could be useful beyond making nightmarishly intertwined structures. It is a new tool for synthetic chemists to create soft polymer components with any structure they may need, like microreactors full of tiny compartments where different chemical reactions can take place or novel containers for drugs in medicine, he says.
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