Hit it hard and it will fracture like a solid… but tilt it slowly and it will flow like a fluid. This is the intriguing property of a type of ‘complex fluid’ which has revealed ‘new physics’ in research by scientists at The University of Nottingham.

The new findings will be highly useful to the manufacturing industry because the processing and dispensing of everyday products like toothpaste, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs depends on an understanding of the physical properties and behaviours of these fluids.

The research just published in Nature Communications by Dr Michael Smith from the School of Physics and Astronomy, with collaborators at the University of Edinburgh and Politecnico di Torino, has used new methods to try to understand the flow properties of these concentrated solutions of particles.