CPM Seminar

Photo-Mechanical Materials: Stuff that Wiggles in Sunlight

Christopher Barrett

Department of Chemistry
McGill University

I will overview some of the new light-responsive materials that we have been developing at McGill Chemistry over the past decade, that generate mechanical motion in response to visible irradiation. Inspired by natural materials that respond mechanically to sunlight, such as plant photo-taxis, or the retinal/rhodopsin proteins that enable vision, some simple artificial mimics can bend and wiggle, flap, flail, and now even ‘walk and roll’, powered only by light. I'll try and highlight the many aspects of unexplained mechanisms, and optimization strategies under debate, that we hope might be of interest to the Materials Physics community.