{"id":208696,"date":"2025-03-14T09:25:22","date_gmt":"2025-03-14T14:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/serendipitous-discovery-reveals-how-stress-and-chemistry-etch-mysterious-spiral-patterns"},"modified":"2025-03-14T09:25:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T14:25:22","slug":"serendipitous-discovery-reveals-how-stress-and-chemistry-etch-mysterious-spiral-patterns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/serendipitous-discovery-reveals-how-stress-and-chemistry-etch-mysterious-spiral-patterns","title":{"rendered":"Serendipitous discovery reveals how stress and chemistry etch mysterious spiral patterns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/serendipitous-discovery-reveals-how-stress-and-chemistry-etch-mysterious-spiral-patterns.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>UCLA doctoral student Yilin Wong noticed that some tiny dots had appeared on one of her samples, which had been accidentally left out overnight. The layered sample consisted of a germanium wafer topped with evaporated metal films in contact with a drop of water. On a whim, she looked at the dots under a microscope and couldn\u2019t believe her eyes. Beautiful spiral patterns had been etched into the germanium surface by a chemical reaction.<\/p>\n<p>Wong\u2019s curiosity led her on a journey to discover what no one had seen before: Hundreds of near-identical spiral patterns can spontaneously form on a centimeter square germanium chip. Moreover, small changes in experiment parameters, such as the thickness of the metal film, generated different patterns, including Archimedean spirals, logarithmic spirals, lotus flower shapes, radially symmetric patterns and more.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery, <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/PhysRevMaterials.9.035201\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Physical Review Materials<\/i>, occurred fortuitously when Wong made a small mistake while attempting to bind DNA to the metal film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UCLA doctoral student Yilin Wong noticed that some tiny dots had appeared on one of her samples, which had been accidentally left out overnight. The layered sample consisted of a germanium wafer topped with evaporated metal films in contact with a drop of water. On a whim, she looked at the dots under a microscope [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1523,1509],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}