Complex Materials

Thank you.

It's a pleasure.

So I'm excited to talk to you about a bunch of different things you're working on.

But the specific piece I want to start with, your group is part of a larger collaboration that's made a fused silk material.

So I want to ask you, what is fused silk? And how has this collaboration made new materials out of it?

Fused silk is an interesting type of new material that combines order and disorder.

Silk itself has its unique properties.

due to the fact that parts of silk fiber are crystalline and parts of it are amorphous.

And for a long time it was a problem how to make silk-based materials that would be formable.

And that would be not in fibrous form, but maybe in the blocks.

And I joined the collaboration with my colleagues from Imperial College London, Emiliano Pilotti, when they already developed that technology, how to transform fibrous silk into bulk silk.

The chemistry of that is quite interesting.

they are used at high pressure and moderate temperature in order to melt just slightly the amorphous part and keep the crystalline part.

And when the amorphous part fuses together, the fibers produce a monolith continuum.

And my part of this collaboration was to establish the new properties that are unusual for such type of materials.

And by using the previous knowledge about this combination of crystallinity and disorder, I found that we can have very strong polarization rotation, new optical properties in terahertz part of the spectrum.

I would like to unpack that a little bit because I think the general public will think of more of the fabric, like maybe our tie would be made out of silk or something along those lines.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure.

So I'm excited to talk to you about a bunch of different things you're working on.

But the specific piece I want to start with, your group is part of a larger collaboration that's made a fused silk material.

So I want to ask you, what is fused silk? And how has this collaboration made new materials out of it?

Fused silk is an interesting type of new material that combines order and disorder.

Silk itself has its unique properties.

due to the fact that parts of silk fiber are crystalline and parts of it are amorphous.

And for a long time it was a problem how to make silk-based materials that would be formable.

And that would be not in fibrous form, but maybe in the blocks.

And I joined the collaboration with my colleagues from Imperial College London, Emiliano Pilotti, when they already developed that technology, how to transform fibrous silk into bulk silk.

The chemistry of that is quite interesting.

they are used at high pressure and moderate temperature in order to melt just slightly the amorphous part and keep the crystalline part.

And when the amorphous part fuses together, the fibers produce a monolith continuum.

And my part of this collaboration was to establish the new properties that are unusual for such type of materials.

And by using the previous knowledge about this combination of crystallinity and disorder, I found that we can have very strong polarization rotation, new optical properties in terahertz part of the spectrum.

I would like to unpack that a little bit because I think the general public will think of more of the fabric, like maybe our tie would be made out of silk or something along those lines.