Bubbles Enable Volumetric Negative Compressibility in Metastable Elastocapillary Systems

Published

June 13, 2024

Author(s)

Davide Caprini, Francesco Battista, Pawel Zajdel, Giovanni Di Muccio, Carlo Guardiani, Benjamin Trump, Marcus Carter, Andrey Yakovenko, Eder Amayuelas, Luis Bartolome, Simone Meloni, Yaroslav Grosu, Carlo Massimo Casciola, Alberto Giacomello

Abstract

Although coveted in applications, few materials expand when subject to compression or contract under decompression, i.e., exhibit negative compressibility. A key step to achieve such counterintuitive behaviour is the destabilisations of (meta)stable equilibria of the constituents. Here, we propose a simple strategy to obtain negative compressibility exploiting capillary forces both to precompress the elastic material and to release such precompression by a threshold phenomenon – the reversible formation of a bubble in a hydrophobic flexible cavity. We demonstrate that the solid part of such metastable elastocapillary systems displays negative compressibility across different scales: hydrophobic microporous materials, proteins, and millimetre-sized laminae. This concept is applicable to fields such as porous materials, biomolecules, sensors and may be easily extended to create unexpected material susceptibilities.

Citation

Nature Communications

Volume

15

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49136-w

Local Download

Keywords

Metal-organic Frameworks, negative compressibility

Citation

Caprini, D. , Battista, F. , Zajdel, P. , Di Muccio, G. , Guardiani, C. , Trump, B. , Carter, M. , Yakovenko, A. , Amayuelas, E. , Bartolome, L. , Meloni, S. , Grosu, Y. , Massimo Casciola, C. and Giacomello, A. (2024), Bubbles Enable Volumetric Negative Compressibility in Metastable Elastocapillary Systems, Nature Communications, [online], https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49136-w, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=935909 (Accessed October 14, 2025)