Smart Plastics Organize Themselves

Engineers have created plastics materials that assemble themselves into sophisticated optical devices known as photonic crystals, according to a report published in the journal Science. The process, called “hierarchical self-assembly”, allows molecules to organize themselves into discrete microscopic structures, such as hollow spheres. In the current work, two researchers from the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY) have taken the process a step further, developing methods to make billions of those objects come together to form even larger, highly ordered structures visible to the naked eye.