A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered a new fluid behavior that challenges long-standing ideas in thermodynamics. The “shape-recovering liquid” is a mixture of oil, water, and magnetized nickel particles that consistently re-forms into an elegant urn shape after being shaken.
The discovery was made by graduate student Anthony Raykh, who experimented with the mixture in his lab. Despite shaking it vigorously, the mixture always returned to its original shape, sparking curiosity among physicists. Further research revealed that the strong magnetism of the nickel particles was responsible for this phenomenon.
Unlike traditional mixtures, where particles added to oil and water decrease the tension at the interface between the two liquids, magnetized nickel particles actually increased the interfacial tension, bending the boundary between oil and water into a curved shape. This “shape-recovering liquid” has no immediate practical application but opens new frontiers in soft-matter science.
The study’s findings were published on April 4 in Nature Physics, funded by the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy.
Source: https://scitechdaily.com/this-self-shaping-liquid-defies-thermodynamics-and-always-rebuilds-its-form