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Metasurfaces is an emerging field that enables the manipulation of light by an ultra-thin structure composed of sub-wavelength antennae and fulfills an important requirement for miniaturized optical elements. Finding a new design for a…
Optical metasurfaces have been heralded as the platform to integrate multiple functionalities in a compact form-factor, potentially replacing bulky components. A central stepping stone towards realizing this promise is the demonstration of…
The rapid design and fabrication of soft robotic matter is of growing interest for shape morphing, actuation, and wearable devices. Here, we report a facile fabrication method for creating soft robotic materials with embedded pneumatics…
Liquid Crystal Elastomers with near-ambient temperature-responsiveness (NAT-LCEs) have been extensively studied for building bio-compatible, low-power consumption devices and robotics. However, conventional manufacturing methods face…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
We consider a class of liquid crystal free-boundary problems for which both the equilibrium shape and internal configuration of a system must simultaneously be determined, for example in films with air- or fluid-liquid crystal interfaces…
We apply inverse design methods to produce two-dimensional triangular-lattice plasma metamaterial (PMM) devices which are then constructed and demonstrated experimentally. Finite difference frequency domain simulations are used along with…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
Recent years have seen the development of mature solutions for reconstructing deformable surfaces from a single image, provided that they are relatively well-textured. By contrast, recovering the 3D shape of texture-less surfaces remains an…
In this paper, we study the problem of shape-programming of incompressible hyperelastic shells through differential growth. The aim of the current work is to determine the growth tensor (or growth functions) that can produce the deformation…
Complex non-local behavior makes designing high efficiency and multifunctional metasurfaces a significant challenge. While using libraries of meta-atoms provide a simple and fast implementation methodology, pillar to pillar interaction…
The inverse design of optical metasurfaces is a rapidly emerging field that has already shown great promise in miniaturizing conventional optics as well as developing completely new optical functionalities. Such a design process relies on…
Programmable structures are systems whose undeformed geometries and material property distributions are deliberately designed to achieve prescribed deformed configurations under specific loading conditions. Inflatable structures are a…
Slender structures, such as rods, often exhibit large nonlinear geometrical deformations even under moderate external forces (e.g., gravity). This characteristic results in a rich variety of morphological changes, making them appealing for…
Certain cephalopods can dynamically camouflage by altering both skin texture and color to match their surroundings. Inspired by this capability, we present a cholesteric liquid crystal elastomer-liquid crystal elastomer (CLCE-LCE) bilayer…
Kirigami tessellations, regular planar patterns formed by cutting flat, thin sheets, have attracted recent scientific interest for their rich geometries, surprising material properties and promise for technologies. Here we pose and solve…
In this paper, we study an elastic bilayer plate composed of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in the top layer and a nonlinearly elastic material in the bottom layer. While the bottom layer is assumed to be stress-free in the flat…
In this paper, the two-dimensional pure bending of a hyperelastic substrate coated by a nematic liquid crystal elastomer (abbreviated as NLCE) is studied within the framework of nonlinear elasticity. The governing system, arising from the…
Designing physical artifacts that serve a purpose - such as tools and other functional structures - is central to engineering as well as everyday human behavior. Though automating design has tremendous promise, general-purpose methods do…