This is no ordinary garden—the blooms you’re looking at are actually micrometer-sized nanocrystals made from the compound zinc oxide. A group of researchers in Taiwan and Australia believe zinc oxide holds the key to the bendy devices of the future.
The team used the compound to build a wafer fit for technologies that benefit from flexibility, such as displays and wearable devices, because the silicon ones used in many electronic devices tend to be stiff. To create a zinc oxide wafer capable of wobbling, the researchers grew the compound on a surface made of the mineral muscovite, as they reported in a 2021 paper published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. The new wafer enables electrons to quickly shuttle through it, a crucial property for high-speed tech, and endures plenty of bending in the lab.
But it took some trial and error to get the wafer just right. As seen here, some attempts to grow zinc oxide into a flat wafer instead created a series of spiky crystals in a stunning arrangement that resembles an otherworldly garden. The experiments also produced what resembles a rugged lakeshore—when it was cut, stress bent the muscovite surface. It wasn’t until years later that the image of this zinc oxide nanoflower-strewn crystal garden, which has been digitally enhanced to boost its hues, got its moment in the sun.
This image, captured with a scanning electron microscope, won the Materials Research Society’s Science as Art competition at the organization’s meeting in April. “The creation of this nanoflower was a beautiful accident,” Chia-Yun Sung, a materials scientist at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, told Nautilus over email. 
Lead image: Ying-Hao Chu.
