The attraction between two spheres, says Chakrabarti, depends on the relationship between the depth to which they are submerged and the separation between them. Credit: Christa Neu It was a straightforward experiment: drop tiny solid spheres of metal and ceramic into a gel material and see what they would do. Aditi Chakrabarti, a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering, wasn’t certain how the particles would behave, but she was hoping to see something no one had seen before. What she saw surpassed her expectations. Looking through a clear, glass container, Chakrabarti watched the spheres sink to a particular depth where they became stagnant in the polyacrylamide gel, which is a soft elastic solid. Her experiments showed that the particles, which measured 2 to 5 millimeters in diameter, not only sank into the gel but began to interact with each other, eventually forming close-packed structures, in a process resembling crystallization. After doing further experiments with combinations of copper, steel, glass and ceramic spheres, Chakrabarti discovered that the forces governing the movements of the particles were the result of the cooperative effects of surface tension, elasticity and gravity. Read more at: Phys.org
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