Synthetic material sheds new light on how liquids separate

Hailin Fu working at the laser-microscope set-up. Photo: Bart van Overbeeke Hailin Fu found the chemical system that behaves like cell organelles with well-defined segregated areas in a water-based solution by accident. She followed the science to the end though, and she describes her and her colleagues' journey of discovery in a new paper just published in Nature. It is quite rare to see a Nature article, with all'authors on the paper coming from the same institute. That the recent Nature article by Hailin Fu and Bert Meijer only features TU/e researchers is a testament to the novelty of their findings and the strong collaborative ties at our university. "This is the first time, as far as we know, that someone documents this behavior in synthetic supramolecular polymers," Fu says. "This synthetic system could become a platform with which we can research organic materials to better understand and manipulate their behavior.