Creating better-performing materials comes down to having more control over their structure at the smallest possible scale. One particularly effective way to accomplish that is using nanoparticles, which have highly customizable shapes and sizes and have already shown promise in applications across energy, medicine and electronics.

But the process of turning nanoparticles into useful new materials has been hampered by the difficulty of controlling the number and direction of the links between each particle and its neighbors. Researchers have tried changing the shape of particles or precisely aligning the rigid connector chains between them, but both of those methods limit the material structures nanoparticles are able to form and are difficult to scale.

A team including researchers from MIT is taking a different approach. The researchers developed a tunable way to use superflexible connector molecules that regulate the packing of nanoparticle networks by intentionally deforming based on their surrounding environment. In a paper published in Nature Materials, the researchers showed how connector flexibility and electric charges can be used to tune the network’s structure, and they used the technique to create new kinds of nanoparticle-based materials.