As a physicist, I often show utter laziness in understanding the chemistry of responsive materials, though I have been working in the chemical faculty for years. In fact, there are so many expert chemists around the world, I see no room for myself to add any value into their excellence.
After making light responsive “robots” for many years by taking out the materials from liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) community, our group were gifted with another amazing material – light deformable rubber. See our first collaborative paper by Dr. Qi Yang, et al., appears in Advanced Functional Materials. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202206939
The Light Robots group together with our collaborators from Qingdao University of Science & Technology are confident about the future of this novel material. We foresee many interesting research in the years to come.
Personally, I would like to highlight two important contributions in this project, and express my gratitude:
- Material inventors: they are the excellent synthetic chemists, Dr. Qi Yang and Professor Heng Liu from Qingdao University of Science & Technology.
- Scientific counselor: the most professional, thoughtful and approachable Prof. Hamed Shahsavan from University of Waterloo.