 We have to cut metals for various applications and so on to make products. And it's also common lore that it's very difficult to cut metals if the metal is hard. What is less well known is that soft metals, aluminum, stainless steels, nickel alloys, they're also equally difficult, if not more difficult to cut than some of the harder materials like tool steels. And this is because when you try cutting them, the metal flows in a very gooey way which makes it difficult to cut. A couple of years ago when we started examining this problem we found that if you applied some common media like sharpie or metal marking inks or even glues to the initial surface of the metal that you're going to cut, these soft metals cut very nicely. The forces were low, the cut surface quality was very good. And we were curious what is the mechanism behind the action of these chemicals. So initially we thought that perhaps there's a secret ingredient in all of these media in the sharpie and the glue which is causing this improvement in the cutting. But curiously we didn't find any common ingredient amongst all of these media and we were perplexed as to why this was happening. These films were a few hundred nanometers thick but we hypothesized maybe we don't need those kinds of thick films since the metal sees only what is in its immediate vicinity. So we decided that we need to deposit one molecule at a time to understand whether that molecule is having the effect or not. What we did was we deposited a monolayer. There's a well-established protocol to do this. We varied the chain length of the molecule in the different experiments. What we found was that only molecules which had a chain length greater than six, so seven or greater, only they would have the effect. This was very interesting because naively we might have thought that it is the chemistry of the molecule of the bonding which is going to have the effect. What we found was that the chemistry doesn't matter. It is the, or at least it is of secondary importance. What is of primary importance is the chain length. Long chain organic molecules when they're on a metal they induce a tensile surface stress and when you have this tensile surface stress that results in embrittlement. The short chain organic molecules don't induce a surface stress. This is also very interesting because the organic media that we tried like sharpies and glues, all of them have these large long chain molecules and it makes sense that they were showing this effect. The high-speed camera shows how the mechanics of metal deformation is changing. Without the monolayer the deformation is highly sinuous and the metal is very ductile. But with the long chain monolayer the metal is embrittle. You have periodic fractures coming from the surface that makes it very easy to cut. What we have learned is the remarkable effects one molecule thick films can have on properties of metal surfaces and how these effects or phenomena can be exploited to improve metals processing. Thank you for watching.