Nature Materials Feature: Self-Healing

Hannes Schniepp's work on revealing the self-healing behavior of molecularly small structures formed out of detergent molecules has been highlighted in the Oct. 5, 2006 issues of the highly prestigious journal Nature Materials.

The work was carried out under the supervision of Ilhan Aksay (Princeton University, Chemical Engineering Department). Using the atomic force microscope (AFM), Hannes Schniepp first revealed that detergent molecules self-assembly into cylinders with a diameter of as little as 5 nm (10,000 times thinner than a human hair). Then, he revealed that these cylinders cylinder can self-heal in a small fraction of a second, if destroyed. Full self-healing was observed within a few thousandths of one second; perhaps it even occurs much quicker than that.

The paper was originally published in the prestigious journal Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) in 2006: "Self-Healing of Surfactant Surface Micelles on Millisecond Time Scales".

• Publisher's web page of article (subscription required):
  http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v5/n10/full/nmat1753.html
• Our publication in JACS

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