At first glance it looks like a screen protector for your smartphone. The transparent sheet is sheer and flat—and around twenty times thinner than a piece of paper. But get this odd material hot and something strange happens.

The sheet expands upwards, morphing into a pre-programmed 3d shape that's tough yet springy (like a rubber-band) and more than a hundred times thicker than before. For a study out in Science today, the material's creators programmed it to transform into a mini quartet of mountains—and as it forms the four peaks, it lifts a slate of glass 175 times its own weight.

Timothy White—one of the materials scientists who developed the strange new material at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory—says this is a new a type of shape-changing LCE, or liquid crystal elastomer. LCEs are class of bendy, elastic materials can stretch and expand with heat or in a chemical bath.

It lifts a slate of glass 175 times its own weight

Scientists have known about LCEs since the 1980s. But for the last three decades, they've been unable to get a flexible sheet of the stuff to morph with anything close to precision. White and his colleagues have just solved this programming issue with a bit of tricky chemistry. They can even get their LCEs to fold into simple origami shapes.

"In simple terms, what we have here is a material that has many of the properties of a rubber-band, and we're basically programming them to do work," White says. "In the future, I think you could imagine creating flight-responsive surfaces for aircraft with these types of materials, or even using them in something like an Apple device."

Programming a material

To understand how White and his colleagues program a flat sheet to fold in three dimension, you need to know a little more about how the LCE works its magic.

The material is made up of a dense fabric of interconnected elastic molecules called elastomers. Each is like a long, thin spring. Individually, these springs can expand or contract with temperature. But if you haphazardly combined your tiny springs together into a sheet, and then heated the sheet, you'd end up with a big mess. That's because all your springs would be pulling and pushing their neighbors in completely random directions.

Think of it as using light to give instructions

They key is getting the springs to align in the direction you want them to go. That way, you can tell different clusters of springs which direction they need to push, and when they do, they expand to form the shape you want. Rafael Verduzco, a nano-materials researcher at Rice Univerity (who was not involved in the new LCE development,) says that this is exactly what White's team was able to do. "They use a new approach with polarized light to pattern these elastomers in a very complex way. And with this complex pattern, the material can perform complex shape changes."

Think of it as using light to give the strings their instructions. The researchers embed within their LCE material a light-sensitive dye that, when blasted with different polarizations of light, aligns the elastomers in different directions. This laser-printing can be performed to make the material form virtually any pattern or 3D shape. To show how versatile and precise the method is, the scientists even reprinted a picture of the Wright brothers onto a LCE sheet.

Hot hot heat

While White's new LCE is undoubtedly impressive, it's doubtful that we'll see this specific LCE in commercial use—on the wing of an aircraft of on the screen of your tablet—anytime soon. That's because the temperatures required to transform this material are toasty—in the range of 350 degrees. Although these materials also change shape at room temperature in the presence of other chemicals, it's not yet clear how this could be effectively leveraged in a commercial product.

This gives us another class of smart materials

But more important than the material itself, Verduzco says, is the method. It shows how others scientists could play with other LCEs.

"This work really gives us another class of smart materials, and another approach to work with them," he says. As far as flat, flexible sheets transforming themselves into 3d shapes, "there really is no other material like it."

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