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In many scenarios -- when we bite food or during a crash -- fracture is inevitable. Finding solutions to steer fracture to mitigate its impact or turn it into a purposeful functionality, is therefore crucial. Strategies using composites,…

Metamaterials are a new generation of advanced materials, exhibiting engineered microstructures that enable customized material properties not found in nature. The dynamics of metamaterials are particularly fascinating, promising the…

Solid-solid phase transitions are ubiquitous in nature, but the kinetic pathway of anisotropic particle systems remains elusive, where the coupling between translational and rotational motions plays a critical role in various kinetic…

Mechanical metamaterials are architected manmade materials that allow for unique behaviors not observed in nature, making them promising candidates for a wide range of applications. Existing metamaterials lack tunability as their properties…

Multi-stable mechanical structures find cutting-edge applications across various domains due to their reconfigurability, which offers innovative possibilities for engineering and technology advancements. This study explores the emergence of…

Mechanical metamaterials have continued to offer unprecedented tunability in mechanical properties, but most designs to date have prioritized attaining high stiffness and strength while sacrificing deformability. The emergence of woven…

Mechanical metamaterials, whose unique mechanical properties stem from their structural design rather than material constituents, are gaining popularity in engineering applications. In particular, recent advances in self-assembly techniques…

Pattern-forming metamaterials feature microstructures specifically designed to change the material's macroscopic properties due to internal instabilities. These can be triggered either by mechanical deformation or, in the case of active…

Active metamaterials are engineered structures that possess novel properties that can be changed after the point of manufacture. Their novel properties arise predominantly from their physical structure, as opposed to their chemical…

Shape-morphing metamaterials enable adaptive structures capable of complex functional deformations, with applications ranging from reconfigurable structures and soft robotics to medical devices. However, their design remains challenging due…

From self-assembly and protein folding to combinatorial metamaterials, a key challenge in material design is finding the right combination of interacting building blocks that yield targeted properties. Such structures are fiendishly…

Mechanical and phononic metamaterials exhibiting negative elastic moduli, gapped vibrational spectra, or topologically protected modes enable precise control of structural and acoustic functionalities. While much progress has been made in…

Materials which feature bistable elements, hysterons, exhibit memory effects. Often these hysterons are difficult to observe or control directly. Here we introduce a mechanical metamaterial in which slender elements, interacting with…

The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…

Metamaterials, synthetic materials with customized properties, have emerged as a promising field due to advancements in additive manufacturing. These materials derive unique mechanical properties from their internal lattice structures,…

Deployable structures, essential across various engineering applications ranging from umbrellas to satellites, are evolving to include soft, morphable designs where geometry drives transformation. However, a major challenge for soft…

Dynamic shape-morphing soft materials systems are ubiquitous in living organisms; they are also of rapidly increasing relevance to emerging technologies in soft machines, flexible electronics, and smart medicines. Soft matter equipped with…

The nonlinear response of driven complex materials -- disordered magnets, amorphous media, crumpled sheets -- features intricate transition pathways where the system repeatedly hops between metastable states. % which encode memory effects.…

Despite the fundamental importance of solid--solid transitions for metallurgy, ceramics, earth science, reconfigurable materials, and colloidal matter, the details of how materials transform between two solid structures are poorly…

Metamaterials based on mechanical elements have been developed over the past decade as a powerful platform for exploring analogs of electron transport in exotic regimes that are hard to produce in real materials. In addition to enabling new…