Complex Glasses – Making Oil and Sugar Mix Spontaneously

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Mixtures of surfactant, water, and oil have wide ranging commercial applications spanning the whole gamut of detergent, foods, coatings, fuel and pharmaceutical industries. As a result they have been the subject of intense study for several decades. How we think of complex fluids may forever be changed by the pioneering discovery by the groups of Prof. Ho and Prof. Co, that water in traditional complex fluids can be replaced by sugars and cooled to the solid glass state. As they reported in Nature Materials (2007) p287, simple sugars can spontaneously mix with oil to form optically clear solid glasses containing over 50 vol% liquid oil. Expanding the realm of complex fluids to the solid glass state promises many new materials and encapsulation/release applications as highlighted by the New York Times.