Breakthrough organic crystalline material repairs itself in extreme cold temperatures, unlocking new possibilities for space and deep-sea technologies

(Press-News.org) A research team, led by Professor of Chemistry at NYU Abu Dhabi Panče Naumov, in collaboration with a research team led by Professor Hongyu Zhang at Jilin University, China, has discovered a new type of organic crystal that can repair itself after being damaged at extremely low temperatures. This breakthrough could pave the way for the next generation of durable, lightweight materials designed to perform in some of the harshest environments on Earth and beyond.

The material, which is one of the newly researched materials known as smart molecular crystals whose discovery was pioneered by Naumov’s group, can restore its structure even at –196°C, the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen, and continues to function across a wide temperature range up to 150°C. In experiments, the team observed that after being mechanically damaged in extreme cold, the crystal could repair itself and recover its ability to transmit light, a property essential for low-temperature flexible optical and electronic devices.

“On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger, tragically failed due to the freezing and malfunction of rubber O-rings in the solid rocket booster joints. This example is one incident where soft materials, including plastics and rubbers, lose their flexibility and crack in low temperatures, with the best ones becoming brittle and crack below –130°C. This drawback, inherent to the disordered structure of these materials, can jeopardize major space exploration projects that use polymeric materials,” said Naumov, who leads the Smart Materials Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. “The material that we reported, being organic, lightweight and having an ordered structure, does the opposite; it can heal itself even when frozen. That makes this and possibly other organic crystals strong candidates for technologies used in space exploration, deep-sea operations, or polar research.”

This self-healing ability comes from the crystal’s unique molecular structure. Its molecules carry permanent dipole moments, meaning they have positive and negative ends that attract one another. These dipole–dipole interactions allow the material to reconnect and repair itself when broken, even in extreme cold.

Until now, self-healing was mostly observed in soft materials such as gels or polymers at ambient or high temperatures, which stop working in freezing conditions. The NYUAD team’s discovery is the first to demonstrate self-healing in an organic crystal, a more ordered and rigid material, across such a wide temperature range, including cryogenic conditions.

By overcoming one of the biggest challenges in material durability at low temperatures, this research opens new possibilities for creating flexible electronic and optical devices that can function reliably in outer space or other extremely cold environments.

The study was conducted at NYU Abu Dhabi and Jilin University and published in Nature Materials.

Times Higher Education ranks NYU among the world’s top 31 universities, making NYU Abu Dhabi the highest globally ranked university in the UAE. Alumni achievements include 24 Rhodes Scholars, underscoring the caliber of talent nurtured at the University. On the faculty and research front, NYUAD now has four Nobel Laureates and established more than 90 faculty labs and projects, producing over 9,500 internationally recognized publications. According to the Nature Index, NYUAD ranks number one in the UAE for publications in the world’s top science journals.

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