World’s Lightest Solid Material Developed in California

The world’s lightest metallic material has been developed in California. The solid matter is so light it can rest itself on the top of the most delicate dandelion.

It’s said to be 100 times lighter than Styrofoam.

Its slender nickel-phosphorus tubes are 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, but because they’re arranged in a certain asterisk-like pattern, the resulting lattice is enormously strong and can absorb tremendous amount of energy.

The new material draws parallels with large structures, such as the Eiffel Tower, which is incredibly light and weight-efficient thanks to its hierarchical lattice design.

The ultralight micro-lattice material shows the same concept can also reap benefits on a much smaller scale. The wall thickness of the hollow tubes can be measured in nanometers, the diameter of each tube in microns, each tube length in millimeters, and the entire micro-lattice in centimeters – or even one day, meters, claim the researchers.

“Our vision is to revolutionize lightweight materials by adopting principles of architecture into their design,” says researcher Tobias Schaedler, lead scientist at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California.

“If you look at the Eiffel Tower or Golden Gate Bridge, they’re incredibly light and strong for their size by virtue of their architecture — the Eiffel Tower is taller and lighter than the pyramids because of its design,” Schaedler explained. “We want to achieve the same thing these modern buildings achieve by working on the structures of materials.”

So far, the material’s unique combination of flexibility and strength might be used for battery electrodes and applications that require shock energy damping.

Related articles

• World’s Lightest Solid Takes Inspiration From Eiffel Tower (livescience.com)
• The ‘Eiffel Tower of micro-architecture’ (blogs.nature.com)