Organic crystalline material opens new prospects for space, deep-sea technologies

ABU DHABI, 21st January, 2026 (WAM) — A research team, led by Professor of Chemistry at NYU Abu Dhabi Panče Naumov, in collaboration with a research team led by Professor Hongyu Zhang at Jilin University, China, has discovered a new type of organic crystal that can repair itself after being damaged at extremely low temperatures.

This breakthrough could pave the way for the next generation of durable, lightweight materials designed to perform in some of the harshest environments on Earth and beyond.

The material can restore its structure even at –196°C, the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen, and continues to function across a wide temperature range up to 150°C.

In experiments, the team observed that after being mechanically damaged in extreme cold, the crystal could repair itself and recover its ability to transmit light, a property essential for low-temperature flexible optical and electronic devices.

Naumov, who leads the Smart Materials Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi, said that soft materials such as plastics and rubbers lose flexibility and crack at low temperatures due to their disordered structure, which can jeopardise major space exploration projects that rely on polymeric materials.

He added, “The material that we reported, being organic, lightweight and having an ordered structure, does the opposite; it can heal itself even when frozen. That makes this and possibly other organic crystals strong candidates for technologies used in space exploration, deep-sea operations, or polar research.”

The study was conducted at NYU Abu Dhabi and Jilin University and published in Nature Materials.