Zeroing in on the cause of self healing

As I have mentioned in the past, one of our biggest projects seeks to develop an understanding of the mysterious self healing process following damage to a molecule by a zap of light. Recently, a former graduate and I developed a model of the healing process that hinges on the formation of domains of molecules. Members of these domains are highly cooperative: they accelerate the healing of a damaged molecule in proportion to the size of the group and they prevent their comrades from being damaged. This behavior is as strange from the sociological perspective as it is from the underlying physics. Why do the molecules aggregate and how does their community enhance healing and prevent physical damage?

We have gone out on a limb and made what I believe is a bold assertion; that there are forces between the molecules that cause them to aggregate, and that these same forces are responsible for healing. Such an assertion would be just a wild guess if it were not for lots of data that we find to be consistent with our model. With only three parameters, our data fits the model as a function of temperature, concentration, time, and intensity. The model also makes predictions beyond our present experimental capabilities, so it will gain acceptance only if it holds up to future scrutiny.

When submitting something this interesting (at least to us) that may go past the present paradigms (Shiva got some lifted eyebrows and jaw dropping during an interview talk, which turned to nods of approval after he presented supporting evidence), one always worries that the work will not be understood. There are many examples of Nobel-prizewinning work being rejected by a journal. In our case, the first journal did not even send the paper out to review, claiming that our work was not appropriate. How can a physics paper not be appropriate to a physics journal?

Of course, I have no illusions that this is a Nobel-prizewinning paper, but if the underlying mechanism is found to be new, it could very well end up being a significant achievement for whoever makes this discovery.

Rather than fight the editor, back in mid May, we sent the paper to a second journal of equal quality. Then we waited. I was still concerned that the reviewers may not see the importance of the work. But alas, they accepted it on the first pass, suggesting only minor revisions. And it was also incredibly fast given the nature of our paper. The first reviewer summarizes the paper as follows,

"This interesting manuscript continues the authors' work aimed at discovering the mechanism behind the observation of self-healing of photoluminescence in chromophore doped polymers. The authors have proposed a phenomenological model for their observations that is able to predict aspects of the time, temperature, concentration and intensity dependence. The model focuses on the formation of dye domains in the polymer and studies the dynamics of these..."

Then (s)he goes on,

"While these are interesting results, the manuscript could be more satisfying if the authors did more to understand the physical mechanisms behind the model. Some well-considered speculation on the materials physics in the conclusions would suffice. "

We tried to hold back on speculation, but this review gives us an opportunity to present what we think is happening. Incidentally, the reviewer is right that we need to work more on the mechanisms, which is exactly what we are doing now. We are already getting data that is pointing at the mechanism, but its still too premature to mention.

The second reviewer made no suggestions for revisions and believes that the paper is in good shape in its present form. (S)he writes,

"In this paper authors present a model on photodegradation/self-healing kinetics of dye molecules doped in a polymer matrix. This investigation is an extension of their previous work. Using phenomenological arguments the authors generalize their model. They allow (implicitly) for association of dye molecules which form correlated domains interacting with the polymer matrix. A healing rate is assumed to be proportional to the number of undamaged molecules in a correlated region and a decay rate is proportional to the intensity normalized to the correlation volume. The model proposed by the authors predicts decay and recovery of the population of doped molecules. The results of the theory are successfully tested with experimental data.

"The paper is generally well written and contains several interesting results. I recommend it to be published as it stands..."

The next step will be to determine the physical significance of these parameters. I am excited by the prospects that we may be looking at some very new physics because this process is like no other that I have ever seen. As I sit at my computer bogged down with lots of administrative tasks, new physics is in the air. I hope to be able to get back with pencil and paper to work on the next set of ideas. But first I need to work on some proposals so that we have the resources to do lots of wonderful work in the future. And as penance for writing proposals, I also have some that I need to review. Similarly, I have a pileup of papers to review.

Hopefully in my next post I will report on even more interesting physics. On another project, something very exciting is brewing. Again, new physics! Until then, ...