Meet the brothers creating clothes from the future, using graphene, copper, DNA, and more... On the hunt for the first invisibility cloak
Designing for the next century of climate change and space exploration
Vollebak founders: British designers and twin brothers Nick and Steve Tidball
“Our clothing tackles the fundamental challenges of our time. As we head into a world of climate change, resource scarcity, disease and space exploration, we’re using material technology to create the future. Today we work with the most advanced materials in the world. Some started their life in nature. Others started their life at NASA.”
GRAPHENE
GRAPHENE IS THE LIGHTEST, STRONGEST, MOST CONDUCTIVE MATERIAL EVER DISCOVERED… IT ALSO COMES WITH A NOBEL PRIZE. While the existence of graphene as a supermaterial was first theorised in the 1940s, it wasn’t until 2004 that two maverick scientists at the University of Manchester were able to isolate and test it. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov peeled layer after layer off a shaving of graphite using Scotch tape until they produced a sample of graphene just one atom thick. In 2010 their work won them the Nobel Prize. And the method behind their discovery was so mind-blowingly simple it was compared to finding CERN’s Large Hadron Collider on your desk.
Thanks to their pioneering work we’ve been creating our own world firsts with graphene since 2018.
We started 5 years ago by building the world’s first Graphene Jacket. It was an experimental prototype – a reversible jacket with one side coated in graphene and the other side not – so you could literally carry out your own experiments while wearing it. We then spent the next 3 years working with the newly built National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester. And together we used graphene to create the world’s first Thermal Camouflage Jacket. Built with hundreds of layers of graphene, it was a computer-programmable jacket designed to bring us one step closer to an invisibility cloak. Now, 5 years after we first started working with the supermaterial, we’re getting closer to building a graphene skin. Our new Graphene Jacket is built
with an ultra-thin graphene membrane at its core that can store and redistribute heat, help regulate your temperature, and reduce humidity next to your body. We sandwich the graphene membrane in between two layers of super thin Nylon mesh before laminating the three layers together to create a single ultralight fabric. While the mesh protects and strengthens the membrane, the microscopic gaps in the mesh let the graphene nanoplatelets interact with your body and the outside world at the same time. The Graphene Jacket is also highly breathable, highly waterproof, and thanks to the graphene nanoplatelets only being a few atoms thick, weighs just 197 grams.
Above: In 2018 we built the world’s first graphene jacket. Then in 2022 we used graphene to bring us one step closer to an invisibility cloak.
Top right: When graphite is reduced to a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon formation, it turns into a supermaterial unlike anything ever known before – it’s so strong and so stretchy that the fibres of a giant spider web coated in graphene could catch a falling plane. Left: You can heat the jacket up by leaving it out in the sun or over a radiator, and the graphene will simply store the heat and spread it around your body when you put the jacket on. Bottom right: Graphene conducts heat better than any material on Earth. So when you’re wearing the jacket in cold weather it helps equalise your skin temperature by sending heat from the hot bits of your body like your head, to the cold bits like your hands. It’s the first wave of conductive fabrics that will carry heat around your body but without any power source.
DEEP SPACE PARACHUTES
OUR TITAN RANGE IS TESTED IN LIQUID NITROGEN AND BUILT WITH THE DEEP SPACE PARACHUTES THAT LAND PROBES ON MARS AND TITAN.
On 18 February 2021, the Perseverance Rover was heading towards Mars at 20,000kmph, or Mach 16, and it needed something to slow it down. The impact shock of slamming on the brakes at hypersonic speed is incredible. But NASA had created the lightest, strongest and most temperature resistant parachute fabric ever produced. Just a couple of seconds after the parachute opened the Rover had slowed to just 320kmph, reducing its speed by over 98%. 16 years earlier the same technology was used to land the Cassini-Huygens probe on Titan during Saturn’s first ever space-research mission.
With winters on Earth becoming increasingly violent, embracing the challenges of Titan forces us to push the technological boundaries of extreme cold weather clothing. Saturn’s largest moon comes with an atmosphere 4x thicker than Earth’s, and it’s only the second body in our Solar System known to have liquid on its surface – we live on the other one. It just happens to be cryogenically cold. With average surface temperatures of -179°C, it’s twice as cold as anything recorded on Earth. It also has methane monsoons and cryovolcanoes spewing out jets of freezing hydrocarbon rain. So don’t book your flight just yet.
On Christmas Day 2004, after a 7 year journey, the same parachute deployed about 180km above Titan’s surface. On 14 January 2005 Cassini began successfully broadcasting images of Titan’s surface from Huygens back to Earth. It became the first probe to land in the outer Solar System – the furthest any spacecraft has ever landed.
To stand a chance of getting close to the surface temperatures on Titan we tested our Titan gear the same way you test components in missiles.
Today our Titan Puffer and Titan Pants are not only built from the same extreme-strength parachute material used by NASA to land the CassiniHuygens probe on Titan and the Perseverance Rover on Mars, but they’re tested down to -100°C in
Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT), also known as Destruct Testing, uses a liquid nitrogen cooling system to create rapid temperature changes, putting enormous stress on anything inside the chamber. The method is normally used on
a liquid nitrogen chamber.
Just like the Moon and Mars, NASA think Titan has the potential to be our next home.
hardware like electronic components for missiles which need to survive in freezing temperatures at high altitude, making us the first to ever use it for testing a piece of clothing.
The HALT chamber is about a metre high, a metre deep and a metre wide. It’s also -100°C in there and filled with liquid nitrogen. So it’s not a space you put people in. Instead we put the Titan Puffer on a static mannequin with a heat source inside it, placing thermocouples in key zones including the chest and back. We then sprayed it with water and blasted it with liquid nitrogen at -100°C, which is as cold as the chamber goes. Even with a static mannequin that couldn’t move and was only wearing the jacket, the body’s core temperature remained warm and stable at -50°C. So we turned the chamber down to -100°C to see what would happen next. In temperatures this cold you’re not just thinking about the human body surviving. You’re thinking about the jacket not freezing and shattering. The Titan Puffer came out intact. So we’re on the right track. And the mannequin’s temperature stayed stable for 5 minutes at -100°C, which is colder than any temperature ever recorded on Earth.
Above: Designed to withstand places colder than Earth, our Titan gear is constructed with NASA technology and tested down to -100°C in a liquid nitrogen chamber.
With deep space missions costing billions of dollars, you don’t want the parachute to be the thing that fails. So an incredible amount of R&D goes into them. In this case, the high-tenacity, heat-proof nylon took 15 years to develop. Spun at high speed before being washed, coloured and processed with a special finish to ensure rapid deployment, they are the lightest, strongest and most heat resistant parachute fabrics ever produced. They are baked at 275°F to kill any microorganisms that might contaminate other worlds, before travelling through space at temperatures well below freezing.
The White edition of the Titan Puffer and Titan Pants.
The White edition of the Titan Hat.
DNA
SHEEP HAVE BEEN CLONED. THE HUMAN GENOME HAS BEEN MAPPED. AND NOW WE’RE USING DNA TO MAKE CLOTHING. 70 years ago this year, a 36-year-old molecular biologist and biophysicist named Francis Crick got to his feet in the middle of lunch at his local pub, The Eagle, and announced that he and his colleague James Watson had “found the secret of life.”
For the last 3 years we’ve been working in collaboration with their biotech start-up, Colorifix, which brings together the fields of biomimetics and molecular microbiology to genetically engineer microorganisms to produce naturally occurring pigments found in DNA.
Head to the outside of the pub today and look up, and you’ll find a small blue plaque that commemorates both the pub’s place in history and one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century.
In simple terms, instead of using synthetic dyes, it’s now possible to genetically engineer the colour blue.
“DNA Double Helix 1953 ‘The Secret of Life,’” it reads. “It was here on February 28th 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson first announced their discovery of how DNA carries genetic information.”
Their discovery changed our understanding of the world. It quickly led to breakthrough after breakthrough, something that’s obvious even if we just consider the last 30 years. In 1990, the Human Genome Project, an international scientific research study with the goal of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes in the human genome, began. In 1996, Dolly the Sheep was cloned. In 1999, the first human chromosome was decoded. In 2000, the genetic code of the fruit fly, all 13,601 genes, was sequenced. In 2003 the Human Genome Project was completed, and it remains the world’s largest collaborative biological project. When we first started making clothing, the idea of getting to work with DNA seemed as improbable as working with single layer graphene, or kryptonite. But thanks to two Cambridge scientists Orr Yarkoni and Jim Ajioka, we’re on the edge of a small revolution. DNA doesn’t just make us, us. It also makes many of the colours we see in the natural world. And together Jim and Orr figured out how to pick out these genetic sequences that create specific colours in nature and use them to grow colours from scratch in a lab.
So how do we actually make our DNA clothing? First you access one of the world’s open-source biomolecular databases. The Universal Protein Resource in Switzerland, and GenBank in Maryland house collections of sequences for 300,000+ organisms. Starting life in the 1980s, today they look after sequences for species from around the world – from plants and animals, to insects and microbes – and their libraries are doubling roughly every 18 months. From these databases we select a protein enzyme found in the cells of the indigo plant. This protein can produce hues ranging from light blue to deep purple. And these DNA databases give us access to the information that encodes the instructions to make these specific colours.
Next comes the fun bit, as you’ll need to imagine a microbiologist with some rubber gloves, a microscope, and a big needle. We then implant the DNA sequence of the indigoid plant into a microorganism – in this case it’s a single bacterial cell in a petri dish which selfreplicates every 20 minutes. And as it replicates, it produces more and more indigo pigment. To make enough colour to dye clothes we obviously need more than just a petri dish of indigo. So we send our genetically engineered microorganisms
to RDD, a cutting-edge dyehouse in Portugal. Here they’re grown in the same way you’d brew beer – through fermentation. The cells are added to a fermentation machine with water, sugar, yeast and plant waste. The more you feed them, the more they grow. And by doubling every 20 minutes they quickly create enough liquid to start dyeing clothes. Once we’ve brewed the bacteria like beer, we then submerge the shorts, t shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts in the DNA soup we’ve brewed up. At this point the bacteria latch onto the surface of the clothing and release their pigment into the fibres of the material to colour it. The process of submerging clothes in dye like this is called garment dyeing. It’s more difficult and takes more time than regular dyeing. And it’s especially difficult when you’re using a completely new kind of dye. But it makes fabric incredibly soft, and look and feel lived in from day one, with colour building up in the stitching and creases, while coming out paler at the edges. So as we continue to explore alternatives to synthetic dyeing, we now have an entire range of clothes made from genetically engineered microorganisms and DNA.
Above: DNA is the biological molecule that contains the genetic code an organism needs to develop, survive and reproduce. It is found in most cells of every organism. The differences in DNA are why one person has blue eyes rather than brown, why giraffes have long necks and why you’ll find more than a thousand different varieties of mango in India.
Above: Every human cell contains around 6 feet of DNA. And with around 10 trillion cells inside each human, that means you’ve got about 16 billion kilometres of DNA inside you. But in case that’s not quite enough, you might like some DNA clothing.
COPPER
DESCRIBED AS “THE VIRUS KILLING COAT OF THE FUTURE,” EVERY FULL METAL JACKET IS BUILT FROM 11 KILOMETRES OF COPPER. Copper is one of the most advanced materials in our solar system. Thrown out of supernovas billions of years ago, it became central to the rise of civilisation, creating tools and sterilising water, before enabling modern day communication, transport, and electrical power. Now, as we look for materials that offer us resistance to disease on Earth and up in space, copper is set to be at the centre of innovation again.
Viruses and bacteria can’t live on copper. It’s why copper was used to create the earliest recorded medical tools in ancient Egypt, and why NASA are using it to develop new ones for space missions. Copper is biostatic, so bacteria and other life forms can’t grow on it. It also has exceptional antimicrobial properties which means bacteria and viruses die when they make contact with it.
Above: Today NASA is exploring the use of 3D-printed copper medical instruments on long-duration space missions to help reduce the risk of infection in space.
The copper releases electrically charged ions which first make it difficult for a microbe to breathe, before punching holes in its outer membrane, moving in and completely wiping out its DNA, preventing it from developing any future resistance. So as we enter a new era of disease on Earth, and we start to think about preventing Earth’s illnesses being carried up into space, we wanted to see whether it was actually possible to start make clothing almost entirely out of copper. The Full Metal Jacket is our first proof of concept. It’s built from 65% copper and has over 11 kilometres of copper in every jacket. That’s enough copper to stretch from one side of NYC to the other and back, if you got bored one day. Of course the process of turning metal into a wearable fabric is complex. It’s expensive, has no real precedent in clothing beyond suits of armour, and there’s no established supply chain. The first of the jacket’s three layers is made from a lacquered copper yarn which is woven on rapier weaving looms before being scoured, heat-set,
Above: Disease resistant clothing will become a logical part of our future. Which is why we’re starting to work with copper now.
dyed and dried. This curing process alone takes six days. The lacquer is completely clear and acts as protection, so the colour of each jacket is the colour of the dyed copper beneath it. The jacket’s middle layer keeps out the rain and wind. The copper is laminated with an advanced waterproof and breathable membrane that can open and close to respond to different weather conditions as they happen, while remaining permanently waterproof and windproof. And once the metal face fabric and advanced membrane have been bonded together, a brushed backing is added on the inside of the jacket to make it soft and malleable.
Opposite: Copper has always been central to the history of innovation. It created the tools from which entire civilisations were built. It was the first metal to be cast in a mould 6,000 years ago, and the first to be alloyed to make bronze. It has provided humans increasingly efficient ways to kill each other – from axes and swords to bullets. But it also gave us increasingly efficient ways to spread information – from the Gutenberg printing press, telegraph and telephone, to circuit boards, computer chips, broadband and telecommunications cables. The first clock, watch, telescope, microscope and battery all relied on copper.
Above: Built by the same machines that build beds, the 3D knitted Mars Hoodie is designed to help you relax on any planet.
Above: An extreme close up of the Solar Charged Puffer, which stores light then glows in the dark.
POLYBENZIMIDAZOLE *
* Invented by Dr Marvel
BUILT FROM POLYBENZIMIDAZOLE, THE APOCALYPSE GEAR WITHSTANDS FLASH FIRES, BLACK LAVA, CHEMICAL EROSION, AND METEORS. In the late 1960s NASA needed something insanely fireproof. As the Cold War and Apollo Program gripped the world, the Department of Defence called up a scientist named Dr Marvel and gave him an apparently impossible brief. Invent a fibre with no melting point. Marvel’s response was polybenzimidazole (PBI), a fibre so revolutionary it wasn’t just used to replace the Apollo cabin crew’s clothing and sleeping bags. It was used to coat its spacecraft too. When Skylab fell to Earth in 1979 the part that survived re-entry was the part coated in PBI. That’s because it can withstand at least 2,370°F, the same temperature as black lava. NASA still uses PBI today. As does the US Army, the aerospace industry and firefighting crews in America, Europe, Asia, Australia and the South Pacific. It’s what enables them to walk through burning buildings. It’s just never been used in civilian clothing before. Until now. Thanks to PBI our Apocalypse Jackets and Pants are designed to withstand end of the world things like flash fires, black lava, chemical erosion and flaming meteors. They can also survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere – just in case you happen to escape it at any point. All fabrics have a tensile strength (which is the force required to snap their fibres). Firefighter
uniforms are required to have a tensile strength of 450 Newtons/55mm. PBI has 5x that. Plus 10x the required tear-strength. We knew our Apocalypse clothing needed to be annihilation-proof. So we worked with a cuttingedge lab on the south coast of England – where its team of technicians and engineers helped us create the jacket’s outer-shell using a combination of PBI and para-aramid, the stuff used to make ballistic-rated body armour. It means that all our Apocalypse gear offers incredible protection against heat, flash fire and arc flash, while retaining its flexibility and strength.
AEROGEL
IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE FOR COLD AIR TO PASS THROUGH AEROGEL. WHICH IS WHY NASA USE IT TO LINE THEIR SPACESUITS.
If you’ve never heard of aerogel before, it’s an insulator, and an astonishingly effective one. Which is exactly why NASA use it to line their spacesuits. It’s almost impossible for cold air to pass through it as its individual nanopores are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. To make aerogel you take silicon gel and put it through a process called supercritical drying, which slowly extracts the liquid part of the gel without collapsing its structure. What you’re left with is a porous, sponge-like material that’s made up of 99% empty space. It’s why aerogel is only 3x more dense than air and the lightest solid material in the world.
Invented at Stanford University in the 1930s, it was adopted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA 60 years later, and it’s been travelling to and from space ever since. When the Pathfinder Sojourner Rover landed on Mars in 1997, it was aerogel that was used to insulate the electronics box because of its thermal properties. And on the Stardust spacecraft, it was aerogel they used to collect samples of interstellar dust from a comet that was moving six times faster than a bullet. So it has a decent CV.
Our aerogel journey started back in 2019 when one of our customers got in touch. It turned out that he worked with one of the most cutting-edge materials labs on Earth, and they were pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with aerogel. Based in Irvine California, AlphaTek develops advanced materials for the aerospace industry. Right now they’re working with NASA on an ultrahigh performance aerogel layer designed to protect the next Mars Rover as it bursts through Mars’ atmosphere at 2000°C. When we first started talking the aerogel insulation in this jacket hadn’t even been invented yet. They were still in the middle of an R&D challenge that’s taken them 10 years to solve – which is how do you create aerogel composites that maintain incredible insulation properties at the same time as making them durable? Most aerogel composites are still physically weak or don’t actually contain much aerogel. And that’s because in its raw form it’s not only fragile but disintegrates when it gets wet.
Their solution represents a breakthrough. The aerogel in the Martian Aerogel Jacket is not only flexible, durable, and waterproof, but there’s also very simply a lot of it.
Above: Aerogel is the lightest and most effective insulator on Earth and beyond. It’s only 3x more dense than air, but it’s almost impossible for cold air to pass through it as its individual nanopores are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.
Half the volume, and 20% of the total weight is
aerogel, which is enormous considering aerogel is only 3x more dense than air. By combining aerogel with an organic foam they created an ultra-thin, highly flexible, waterproof sheet. Just two millimetres thick it comes laser-drilled with hundreds of micropores for enhanced breathability. And it has incredible thermal performance for its thickness and weight. Unlike regular down insulation, it can be totally compressed or soaked in water and still carry on insulating. While it’s never been used in regular clothing before, it’s currently being trialled in rescue dive suits deployed in the freezing waters of the Baltic Sea. We tested the jacket the same way we test our largest puffer jackets, by taking it into the lab and exposing it to the extreme cold. A lucky volunteer gets to put on the jacket and take a seat in our controlled climate chamber before we turn the temperature dial right down. We’re generous and let them wear things like gloves too. Even at -20°C with the test subject sitting completely still, almost no heat escapes from the jacket.
Keeping you warm on the inside of the jacket is a completely new type of laser-drilled aerogel built by the same team making the new aerogel heat shield for the next Mars Rover. Right now they’re working with NASA on an ultra-high performance aerogel layer designed to protect the next Mars Rover as it bursts through Mars’s atmosphere at 2000°C.
Above: This is the first aerogel in the world that’s flexible, durable, and waterproof. It can be totally compressed or soaked in water and still carry on insulating down at -20°C.
Above: The Sashiko Jacket is reinforced with 1 million highstrength stitches, using the ancient Japanese art of sashiko.
Our Wooden T Shirt is built from wood. And coloured with wood. It combines eucalyptus wood pulp sourced from sustainably managed forests, with the cleanest black pigment on Earth sourced from 50 million tonnes of wood waste.
DYNEEMA
DYNEEMA IS USED TO MAKE BULLETPROOF VESTS, ANTI-BALLISTIC VEHICLE ARMOUR, AND THE WORLD’S STRONGEST CLOTHES.
The Indestructible Hat is built with magnetic storm flaps, a waterproof membrane and Dyneema.
Dyneema is the single strongest fibre known to man today. Weight for weight it’s up to 15x stronger than steel. Which is precisely why it’s used to make bulletproof vests, anti-ballistic vehicle armour for tanks, and the ropes used to tie down oil rigs in violent, icy seas. If you’re into chemistry, Dyneema is an ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene that combines extreme strength with very low weight – unlike other high-strength materials it’s so light it floats on water. As well as having the strength to weight ratio of Ant-Man, Dyneema has one more trick up its
sleeve – it actually gets stronger as it gets colder.
As the temperature drops down to -50°C, Dyneema gains 5-10% strength. Projections show that Dyneema gains even more strength at -150°C. And it doesn’t just get stronger, it also loses no strength in relation to abrasion resistance or cutting – which is precisely why Dyneema morring lines are used to ties down giant ships and deep-water oil rigs in freezing seas. So when we decided to build the toughest puffer jacket ever created, we rebuilt the entire outside of it from the strongest fibre ever made. While puffer jackets are traditionally one of the weakest and most delicate pieces of clothing
you can buy, and most can be destroyed by your average kitten, we run real life blunt force trauma tests on the puffer that leave nothing more than some marks on the fabric. As for our Indestructible Hoodie and Pants, they’re woven with a blend of Dyneema for extreme strength, and elastane for extreme stretch, which makes them quite unlike any pants or hoodies that have been built before. While they’re lightweight, stretchy, and just 1 millimetre thick, they can withstand a 75kmph fall and drag on concrete.
Built from Dyneema, the Indestructible Jacket is the toughest utility jacket ever made.
The Indestructible Hoodie is light and stretchy but can withstand 75kmph falls.
The Indestructible Puffer is weight for weight 15X stronger than steel.
THE MATERIALS PROFESSOR AND THE SEARCH FOR INVISIBILITY When he was ten years old Coskun Kocabas tried to turn mercury into gold. As everyone from the 4th Century AD mystic ‘Zosimus the Alchemist’ to Sir Isaac Newton had noted before him, the two metals seemed to share an odd chemistry. “On the Periodic Table, gold is next to mercury,” Kocabas says. “So you get the idea ‘Okay – can we go one square over?’ I know people have tried many times before.” Still, it’s reasonable to assume that few of Kocabas’s predecessors had ever attempted alchemy using an electron gun they’d fashioned out of the cathode-ray tube from back of their parents’ TV. “To make a nuclear reaction, you need to fire electrons at the nucleus of the mercury,” Kocabas explains. “You need a really high voltage. Old TV screens use 32,000 volts to accelerate electrons in a vacuum, and generate light. That’s an electron gun. So I took the TV to bits.” And what happened? “Nothing. It was a big disappointment, actually.” “Also,” he adds “I had no idea mercury was toxic. I shouldn’t have been playing with mercury.” For the young Turkish boy and his twin brother Fatih growing up on a small farm close to Istanbul, such behaviour was par for the course. “We got in trouble many, many times,” he says. “We set fire to the kitchen. We were trying to make glue – you mix a solvent and a polymer, and ‘boom!’ We were interested in the experimental stuff, chemistry.” Getting hold of the kit to do so wasn’t a problem. The recent collapse of the Soviet Union had seen an influx of enterprising Bulgarians crossing the border into Turkey, trying to make a bit of money. “They were selling strange things, anything they could sell,” Kocabas says. “Because they were very poor.” The Kocabas twins would go shopping with the money they’d earned selling milk from their cows. “Every week we’d go to the bazaar and we were able to buy microscopes, telescopes, multimeters, lenses, electronic components,” Kocabas says. “And that motivated us to be physicists.”
Thirty-five years later Fatih Kocabas is a neuroscientist at the department of genetics and bioengineering at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. His work currently involves using light to control brain neurones in animals. Coskun Kocabas, having studied at the University of Illinois and been employed as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, is sitting in his 2nd floor office at the National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester, England, the research institute where he holds the title of Professor of 2D Device Materials. (Graphene, the building block of graphite, is the first two-dimensional material ever discovered: an atom-thick layer of carbon which appears, under an atomic microscope, as a flat lattice of hexagons linked in a honeycomb pattern.) Dr Kocabas has spent the last six years using graphene to develop a thin, lightweight and flexible film that can outfox infrared cameras, allowing hot bodies to appear cool and cold items to appear warm. By using electricity to alter its properties Kocabas has successfully proven he can make this film “thermally indistinguishable from its surroundings.” In other words, he can turn it invisible. All objects emit radiation according to their temperature – you, your shoes, the plant on your desk. Change an object’s temperature and you change its thermal radiation. But Kocabas had worked out a way to control this radiation without changing an object’s temperature, by using voltage to push ions through hundreds of atom-thick layers of graphene. Suppress thermal radiation completely and you effectively switch something ‘off.’ Thermal cameras can’t see it. More recently he’s managed to blend this graphene-based thermal camouflage with fabric. When we heard about this, we approached Kocabas with an idea – could this be used to make a piece of clothing? Kocabas had in his hands the first stage towards producing an invisibility cloak. A proof-of-concept that will make the magical Harry Potter garment a reality. (“If that’s what I think it is, they’re really rare, and really valuable,” – Ron Weasley.) For slightly older readers it’s something akin to the cloaking tech used by the Predator, in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.
“It was science fiction before, right?” Kocabas says. “Not anymore.” Over the last three years we’ve been working with the National Graphene Institute to build a jacket using this science. Now it’s ready. It’s called the Thermal Camouflage Jacket and it’s one of the most technically advanced pieces of clothing ever made. So how do you show it off? Obviously you do something really fun and simple. So the first thing Kocabas did when we’d finished making the jacket was plug his computer into it. And program it to play Tetris. *** The National Graphene Institute opened in 2015 and cost £61 million. Five-stories high and entirely glass-fronted it was designed by the multi-awardwinning architects Jestico + Whiles. On the top floor there’s a garden roof terrace with 21 different grasses and wildflowers, designed to attract bees and other pollinating insects. On the lower ground floor there are state-of-the-art cleanrooms and laser, metrology and chemical laboratories. The reason for the robust investment, some £38m of it from the UK government, is that graphene was instantly hailed as a ‘wonder material’ when it was discovered in 2004. A million times thinner than a human hair, it is the thinnest, lightest and strongest object in the known universe. Despite its weight, or lack of it, it is 150 times stronger than an equivalent weight of steel. It is as pliable as rubber, stretches to 120 percent of its length and can carry a thousand times more electricity than copper. What’s more, electrical current zips across it with virtually no loss, at a million metres a second – not far from the speed of light. Until it was discovered 18 years ago no one knew 2D materials with their extraordinary properties existed. Now graphene’s potential uses are both wide-ranging and seemingly endless. They include replacing silicon in our computer chips, bendable batteries, flexible touchscreens, speedy DNA analysis, fluids to increase the efficiency of oil drills and lighter and faster aircraft. Accordingly, dozens of research groups are at work in the Institute, generating a steady stream of patents. Apple has used graphene for heat-sinks in
Above: For 3 years we’ve been bringing together the fields of physics, optical materials, electronic control systems, textiles and engineering, to create a single piece of clothing that someone can actually wear, that is also an advanced optical device.
“Put an invisibility cloak on your Christmas list for 3022” Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
Above: We start by uploading code from the computer to a microcontroller on the jacket. Gold and copper printed wiring runs to each graphene patch, applying voltage to them. The voltage forces ions between the graphene layers using ionic liquid. And the more ions you push between the graphene layers, the less thermal radiation it emits and the colder it looks.
its batteries. Lockheed Martin for desalination in its planes. Graphene flakes have been used in nuclear power plants – reducing radioactive waste from 90% to 9%. One estimate puts graphene’s potential worth at £30 billion a year, the basis of a whole new economy. Some say it will change the world as steel and plastic did before it. Others have compared it to the invention of the steam engine, or the internet. A “microscopic Lego” that will keep scientists busy “for the next 50 years.” *** The National Graphene Institute is in Manchester because that is where graphene was discovered. “In the building behind this one,” Kocabas says. “They were looking at the semiconducting properties of graphite. Graphite is not a semiconductor by itself. But if you could make it thin enough, could you make carbon-based electronics? That was the goal.” The person leading the research was a Russian
physicist named Andre Geim, who had arrived in the UK in December 1990. In the Soviet Union Geim had been an outstanding and rigorous high-school student – at the age of 16 he won a competition by memorising a thousand-page chemistry dictionary. Until the discovery of graphene he was best known for an experiment that used electromagnets to levitate a frog. (It won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2000, an annual award for the silliest experiment.) The hunt for very thin, conductive substances has been a quest for materials scientists since the start of the computer age, but has almost exclusively been confined to metals. Geim thought graphene had potential. He didn’t invent it: graphene had been around as a concept since the 1980s. But no one had been able to isolate it. The layers of carbon that make up graphite are weakly bonded, hence it being taken up in the 16th century for use in pencils, which leave a trail of solid core material when they’re pressed on paper. If you could shave graphite into an ultrathin layer, Geim proposed, it would be intriguing to see what happened if you then connected a pair of electrodes to it.
Having chiselled away at a tablet of pyrolytic graphite without success, one of Geim’s PhD students, a fellow Russian named Konstantin Novoselov, started looking at discarded bits of Scotch tape in the laboratory bin, covered with graphite residue. Under one electron microscope the tape showed layers thinner than any that had been seen before. They were onto something. The pair devoted the next two years, working fourteen hours a day, to studying their findings. The first surprise was that a two-dimensional object could remain stable at room temperature. The second was that, because of its unique structure, electrons could move across graphene with startling speed. Better still, graphene was not just highly conductive but ‘tuneable,’ meaning the electron flow could be controlled. Graphene’s science fiction-like properties were deemed so unlikely that the 2004 research paper Novoselov-Geim authored was rejected by the journal Nature, twice. (One reader said that isolating a stable, two-dimensional material was “impossible.”) On social media someone later compared this to The Beatles being turned down by every major record company before they got a deal.
In 2010 Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics – a stepup from the Ig Noble Prize. Such are graphene’s amazing properties that the story made headlines across the world, which is not something you can normally say about the Nobel Prize for Physics. (By contrast, one of three 2021 winners was awarded his prize “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”)
It’s also presumably the first time the Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded for an experiment involving Scotch tape and a bin. *** “When you say ‘light,’ what do you understand?” Kocabas asks. Most of us would probably answer ‘What you can see,’ ‘What’s perceptible to the human eye,’ or ‘Not dark.’ But that would be to talk of visible light, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that helps us navigate our day-to-day lives. In physics, ‘light’ is used more broadly to refer to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, visible or not.
So gamma rays, infrared rays, microwaves and
radio waves are also light. And since every single object gives off radiation, everything gives off light. This is what infrared cameras see. Kocabas sits in his sparse office, which could possibly do with a bit more visible light of its own, grabs some pieces of A4 and starts sketching. “Let’s say this is wavelength,” he says. “What you see is very small. Let’s say, 400 nanometres to 700 nanometres. But infrared is up to 50,000 nanometres. From a physics point of view, graphene can work everywhere. So that’s the most amazing part.” Pure graphene is almost transparent to infrared, but Kocabas suspected he could tune its transparency by drenching a stack of hundreds of graphene layers in an ion-rich liquid. By pushing this liquid between the layers and then applying a battery, he was able to alter its visibility under infrared light. When Kocabas used a thermal camera to record what happened when he pressed his hand to the back of the graphene stack, nothing did. The camera could not see his hand through the stack. When he reduced the voltage to zero, his hand became visible again. As he reported in the paper he published in 2018, by varying the voltage of the battery he allowed
some of the heat from his hand to be seen. This
is what makes the system ‘tuneable,’ meaning it can adapt to its environment and act as thermal camouflage.
The final part of the puzzle was blending the technology with textiles. Kocabas had created an optical device, and traditionally optical devices are not compatible with fabrics. Crudely, one is hard and the other is soft. “People try to make smart textiles, adaptive textiles,” Kocabas says. “But the problem is it’s really not compatible with conventional electronic devices, or conventional optical devices. We showed that we could integrate graphene.” For three years we worked with Kocabas to try many, many options. It involved a lot of trial and error. “We must have gone through 100 different fabrics,” Kocabas sighs. “If you look at woven textiles under a microscope they’re very hairy, with a big surface roughness. We had to learn about textile production, and it took months.” For thermal camouflage to be truly effective “in the field” – for an invisibility cloak to become reality – any item of clothing would need to be able to read
Above: On the front of the jacket are 42 graphene patches that can be controlled individually just like pixels. Every patch is made up of over 100 layers of pure graphene. And they control thermal radiation on the jacket’s surface without changing its temperature.
its changing surroundings and adapt accordingly.
“The next step will be, we will measure the background,” Kocabas says. “We could have a camera at the back of the jacket, or we could have a necklace of cameras that measure in different directions, because you don’t need just one. And then it will map the background information onto the jacket. And that’s what we’re working on now.” Kocabas does not see graphene’s uses as limited to camouflage. As per his scribblings on A4, he sees its potential across the entire spectrum of light. “If you go to the airport, and go through the metal detector, that is using microwave radiation, but it would be more efficient if we used terahertz radiation, which has a smaller wavelength. So we are trying to build body scanners using graphene that can read this.” Another one is satellites. They draw their energy from solar panels. But they are subject to extreme heat variations. The exterior of a Low Earth orbit satellite can cycle between 120°C and -170°C, depending on its position to the Sun. The thermal management of these satellites restricts how much tech they can carry, and also their lifespan. Graphene could be used to coat satellites and change how reflective they are depending on their location, using a similar system to the Thermal Camouflage Jacket. *** Satellites and metal detectors are undoubtedly important, but it is the potential of Kocabas’ discovery as camouflage that has captured the imagination.
We’ve been fascinated by the idea ever since ancient humans first thought to drape themselves in forest lichen and flora to help their hunting. Before camouflage became standardised, soldiers would spread mud on their uniforms and paint their clothes with splotches and lines. By World War 2 industrial printing on fabric became possible and camouflage designs entered a golden age. Today there’s a huge array in production, each design being stylistically and tactically specific – rain camouflage to mimic high grasses, tiger stripe camouflage best suited to the jungle, and so on. Camouflage, from the French camoufler, ‘to disguise,’ can mean the difference between life and death. In 2009 the US Congress passed a $106bn emergency war-spending bill that included funding some 70,000 new uniforms for troops in Afghanistan as the fighting moved to the muddy
mountains, terrain ill-suited to the Universal
Camouflage Pattern that worked in the light and dusty desert cities like Basra. Black is unsuited to camouflage because it absorbs light – under infrared it creates a telltale high-contrast image. You won’t find black in nature very often. That’s because, when it comes to camouflage, the animal kingdom has been doing it better and with more style, since forever. Palaeontologists studying fossils of dinosaurs such as the plant-eating Psittacosaurus, a relative of the Triceratops, have concluded that it likely had a dark back and a light belly, an arrangement known as countershading, or Thayer’s Law. This inverse colour scheme is a method of camouflage found across species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and insects, and in both predators and prey. The amount of distribution of the light and dark areas usually corresponds to different habitats, ie bright desert plains, or dark forest floor. Then there are the truly remarkable animals. The crab spider that can mimic tree bark, the flowers they rest on, or the colour of their prey. The arctic fox with a coat that morphs from grey and brown in the summer to snowy white in the winter. And the cuttlefish that possesses millions of chromatophores, cells that contain pigment sacks that can expand and contract to produce local changes in skin contrast, acting as biological colour pixels that can change their appearance in a fraction of a second – the ultimate invisibility cloak. *** Downstairs in his lab, Kocabas stands among a clutter of machinery that includes a polymer laminator, a plasma sputtering system and a vacuum chamber that acts as a space simulator, and fishes out an infrared camera. Outwardly, it looks a lot like a standard DSLR. Switched on, the digital screen glows with warm yellows and reds familiar from TV police procedurals and, indeed, Predator. “The human body generates huge contrast,” he says, training it on at a PhD student tinkering with a microscope. He points it at the light on the ceiling. “Thermal radiation goes to x4 the power of temperature. So the human body is a very bright infrared light source. We radiate 200 watts. Think about it. How much light is that bulb? 30 watts? So the human body is actually very bright. If you have an infrared camera it’s very easy to identify.” You begin to see how useful a graphene-enabled adaptive infrared textile could be. Down here Kocabas and his team grow graphene by placing it on nickel foil, putting it in a furnace and raising the temperature to 1,000 degrees. Bundled up in an adjoining room are some of the early attempts to merge graphene with fabric – the development phase.
Above: While the Thermal Camouflage Jacket only operates on the infrared spectrum today, by using graphene, it should ultimately be possible to build a version that also operates on the visible spectrum at the same time.
“Look at this,” he says, laughing, holding up a raggedy prototype jacket constructed from Tyvek, a synthetic material made from high-density polyethylene, supplied by us. There are various wires and panels falling off it. “This is a failed one! This was actually a big disaster. And this was one of mine. I made this!” *** On the lower ground floor of the National Graphene Institute, there’s 1,500 square metres of cleanroom space, the largest academic space of its kind in the world dedicated to graphene research. Inside, masked and gowned scientists beaver away on designs and inventions that may come to shape our future. Outside one room Kocabas pauses by a framed photo. Taken on the 23rd October 2015, not long after the Institute opened, it shows senior British politicians, including the then Chancellor George Osborne, inside the building flanked by Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Konstantin Novoselov. They are showing around their guest of honour, President Xi Jinping, of China. “He liked graphene,” Kocabas grins. “Now everybody likes graphene.”
The philosopher’s stone – gold – might have eluded Kocabas as a boy. But today the invisibility cloak is within his grasp. Which makes sense. As sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once put it: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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