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Spider silk

Dynamic mechanics

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 1054–1055 (2016)Cite this article

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The discovery of a hypersonic bandgap in spider silk could drive the design of bio-inspired and biocompatible dynamic materials.

Phononic bandgaps correspond to a frequency range in which acoustic waves are forbidden from propagating through a material5,6, and are created by the interference and scattering properties of waves5. At hypersonic frequencies (GHz), the corresponding phonons' wavelengths (<300 nm) match the characteristic length scales (nanoscale to sub-microscale) of silk, which enabled Schneider et al. to use Brillouin light scattering to determine the microstructure of the silk fibres4. The negative dispersive region corresponds to the anomalous dispersion relation in the propagation band, which means that silk at hypersonic frequencies could have a negative refractive index. Hypersonic phononic bandgaps have been seen in hypersonic phononic crystals, which also exhibit photonic bandgaps, preventing both sound and light from travelling at hypersonic frequencies. These materials already show promising applications for acousto-optical devices, such as optical cooling and optically pumped acoustic oscillators5,6. Furthermore, phononic bandgaps could also reduce thermal conductivity by decreasing the flow of phonons, making them candidates for tunable heat management applications6. Similarly, the reported unique hypersonic characteristic of spider silk4 could improve applications for biomedical purposes by bringing controllable biodegradability and biocompatibility.

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Figure 1: The hierarchical structure of spider silk, from macroscale webs to nanoconfined fibrils.
Figure 2: A schematic representation of the importance of pre-strain, mechanical anisotropy and nonlocal nonlinearity in varying the hypersonic phononic tunable in spider silk.

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  1. Isabelle Su and Markus J. Buehler are in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    Isabelle Su & Markus J. Buehler

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  1. Isabelle Su
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  2. Markus J. Buehler
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Correspondence to Markus J. Buehler.

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Su, I., Buehler, M. Dynamic mechanics. Nature Mater 15, 1054–1055 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4721

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