Thinnest Plates That Can Also Flex and Be Picked Up by Hand May Create New Flight Materials

Scientists may have created one of the strongest, lightest and thinnest to date. They've engineered the thinnest plates to date that can be picked up and manipulated by hand.

Despite being thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper and hundreds of times thinner than household cling wrap or aluminum foil, the new plates, made of aluminum oxide, actually spring back to their original shape after being bent and twisted. This is particularly stunning since most thin materials immediately curl up on themselves, like cling wrap, and get stuck in deformed shapes if they are not stretched on a frame or backed by another material.

Being able to stay in shape without additional support would allow this material to be used in aviation and other structural applications where low weight is at a premium.

"Materials on the nanoscale are often much stronger than you'd expect, but they can be hard to use on the macroscale," said Igor Bargatin, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We've essentially created a freestanding plate that has nanoscale thickness but is big enough to be handled by hand. That hasn't been done before."

The new plates are between 25 and 100 nanometers thick and are made by aluminum oxide, which is deposited one atomic layer at a time to achieve precise control of thickness.

"The wings of insects are a few microns thick, and can't be thinner because they're made of cells," said Bargatin. "The thinnest man-made wing material I know of is made by depositing a Myar film on a frame, and it's about half a micron thick. Our plates can be ten or more times thinner than that, and don't need a frame at all. As a result, they weigh as little as than a tenth of a gram per square meter."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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