Indian scientists have recently spotted a self-healing property of organic crystals with a layer-like structure that does not need any external stimuli. This can help design materials that can withstand vertical loads for technological operations.

Currently known self-healing approaches rely primarily on some form of external stimuli such as light, heat or in solution, to trigger the healing process. This greatly limits their use, particularly in applications where external intervention is undesirable or impossible. To enable autonomous self-healing, typical strategies utilized in polymers, hydrogels and composites make use of either cross-linking or healing agents to repair the damaged areas, which prove inadequate for employing in crystalline materials, where reestablishing the crystallinity after healing is very crucial.

Scientists’ teams from the Departments of Physics (led by Prof. Rajesh Kumar), IIT Indore, Department of Chemistry (led by Prof. C Malla Reddy), IIT Hyderabad and Department of Electrical Engineering (led by Prof. Varun Raghunathan) have found that that large micron-sized cracks in flexible crystals can be autonomously healed within milliseconds in organic crystals with a layer-like structure. The self-healing takes place through a novel mechanism called symmetry breaking at the microstructural level as revealed using Raman spectro-microscopy, a facility supported by Department of Science and Technology under Fund for Improvement of S&T Infrastructure in Universities and Higher Educational institutions (FIST) scheme.

Fig: Self-healing event (top) and probing symmetry breaking using Raman micro -spectrometry (bottom)

The researchers investigated this self-healing phenomenon where Raman spectroscopy played an important role in understanding the exact mechanism. The research work was carried out in a collaboration by research scholars Dr Ishita Ghosh, Dr Rabindra Biswas, Dr Manushree Tanwar, Dr Surojit Bhunia, Dr Kaustav Das and Dr Amit Mondal, which is published in ‘Nature Communications’ in 2026.

This study could pave the way towards understanding of self-healing mechanisms operating in living tissues and use them to design suitable smart materials.   

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