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Liquid Metal Transformers

The room temperature liquid metal is quickly emerging as an important functional material in a variety of areas like chip cooling, 3D printing or printed electronics etc. With diverse capabilities in electrical, thermal and flowing behaviors, such fluid owns many intriguing properties that had never been anticipated before. Here, we show a group of unconventional phenomena occurring on the liquid metal objects. Through applying electrical field on the liquid metals immersed in water, a series of complex transformation behaviors such as self-assembling of a sheet of liquid metal film into a single sphere, quick mergences of separate metal droplets, controlled self-rotation and planar locomotion of liquid metal objects can be realized. Meanwhile, it was also found that two accompanying water vortexes were induced and reliably swirled near the rotating liquid metal sphere. Further, effects of the shape, size, voltage, orientation and geometries of the electrodes to control the liquid metal transformers were clarified. Such events are hard to achieve otherwise on rigid metal or conventional liquid spheres. This finding has both fundamental and practical significances which suggest a generalized way of making smart soft machine, collecting discrete metal fluids, as well as flexibly manipulating liquid metal objects including accompanying devices.