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The Egg of Columbus for making the world toughest fibres

A great flourish of interest in the development of new high-strength and high-toughness materials is taking place in contemporary materials science, with the aim of surpassing the mechanical properties of commercial high-performance fibres. Recently, macroscopic buckypapers, nanotube bundles and graphene sheets have been manufactured. While their macroscopic strength remains 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than their theoretical strength, and is thus comparable to that of current commercial fibres, recent progress has been made in significantly increasing toughness. In particular, researchers have produced extremely tough nanotube fibres with toughness modulus values of up to 570 J/g, 870 J/g and very recently, including graphene, reaching 970 J/g, thus well surpassing that of spider silk (170 J/g, with a record for a giant riverine orb spider of 390 J/g and Kevlar (80 J/g). In this letter, thanks to a new paradigm based on structural mechanics rather than on materials science, we present the Egg of Columbus for making fibres with unprecedented toughness: a slider, in the simplest form just a knot, is introduced as smart frictional element to dissipate energy and in general to reshape the fibre constitutive law, showing evidence of a previously hidden toughness, strictly related to the specific strength of the material. The result is a nearly perfectly plastic constitutive law, with a shape mimicking that of spider silk. The proof of concept is experimentally realized making the world toughest fibre, increasing the toughness modulus of a commercial Endumax fibre from 44 J/g up to 1070 J/g. The maximal achievable toughness is expected for graphene, with an ideal value of 100000 J/g.