At the conference International Symposium on Organic and Inorganic Electronic Materials and Related Nanotechnologies, EMNANo-2017m Fukui, Japan dr. Popović gave a lecture under the title: 

Acrobatic crystals – actuators on the nanoscale 

Molecular crystals are interesting species displaying a whole range of alluring responses to the external stimuli. But we usually do not expect them to exhibit nanoscopic acrobatic behaviour in the form of jumping or twisting. A special class of crystals exhibits such behaviour during heating/cooling, called thermosalient materials or, more colloquially, jumping crystals. These materials experience a polymorphic phase transition, so sudden, that the crystals jump from the stage. Apart from being visually extremely attractive, this phenomenon has large technological potential for production of future nanoactuators, artificial muscles, thermal nanosensors, electromechanical devices or materials for electronics.

One of the first reported thermosalient materials was the anticholinergic agent oxitropium bromide [1]. Recently, we discovered a yet unknown polymorph of one of the cousins of oxitropium bromide – scopolamine methyl bromide which also exhibits thermosalient effect. In our study, we not only used experimental techniques accompanied them with DFT calculations which resulted in a wealth of information bringing us much closer to the full understanding of forces governing the thermosalient effect.

[1] Ž. Skoko, S. Zamir, P. Naumov, J. Bernstein: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 132, 14191 (2010).