Melting Marvel

A strange substance bends the rules of glass and plastic

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“COMPLEXIMERS”—MATERIALS that can be molded like window glass but that resist impacts like plastic does— shouldn't exist, researchers say. Nevertheless, a few grams of one such substance sit in a laboratory at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

In Nature Communications, Wageningen physical chemist Jasper van der Gucht and his team describe what makes compleximers as meltable as glass yet as hard to break as plastic. Someday this paradoxical stuff could make it easier to fashion and fix sturdy protective gear such as helmets.

Window glass, called silica, and most plastics are “glassy” materials— when they cool from their liquid states, they don’t solidify into crystals with neatly arranged atoms like water does when it freezes into ice. Instead they form an amorphous mass that feels like a solid but has randomly arranged atoms like a liquid.