Research programme could change current thinking about polymer physics

A research team at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have developed a technique that enables researchers to watch the motion of individual molecules within a polymer.

The discovery challenges current thinking about polymer physics and could lead to new materials that can be tailored for specific tasks.

Until now, researchers’ ability to fully understand polymer properties has been hampered because it was impossible to observe individual polymer chain motion, but the research team, led by Sotoshi Habuchi, has overcome this limitation using super-resolution fluoresense microscopy.

For the polymer study, Habuchi and his team created a polymer with fluorescent tags attached at several points along the chain, and this technique was combined with a single-molecule tracking algorithm developed by the team.

Maram Abidi, a member of the research team, said: “It provided a powerful tool for investigating entangled polymer dynamics at the single-molecule level. Since rheological properties of materials arise microscopically from entangled polymer dynamics, a revision of the reputation theory would have a broad impact not only on fundamental polymer physics but also on the development of a wide range of polymer nanomaterials.”

The team is now planning to apply its technique to more complex systems, including polymer gels and networks of biomolecules within cells.