Saltsale

Common table salt - normally a brittle crystalline material - can be pulled into nanowires that will extend by more than twice their own length without breaking, US researchers have found.

Nathan Moore and his team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were investigating water adsorption onto salt crystals using an interfacial force microscope (IFM) to probe the salt surface when they stumbled upon their discovery.

‘When we poked the salt surface, we saw some unusual force behaviour [between the tip of the microscope probe and the surface]. It seemed crazy at the time, but we thought: "could we be making nanowires?" - of course, seeing is believing, so we put salt in the [transmission electron microscope] and there we saw the nanowires!

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Surprisingly, the salt not only becomes ductile (i.e. able to be pulled into wires), but the wires are also superplastic - they can be extended by more than their own length before breaking. This unusual property is more normally associated with metals and certain ceramics, rather than ionic crystals like salt. The wires can also be compressed back into the crystal, but do tend to bend and buckle.

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