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Mechanical metamaterials capable of large deformations are an emerging platform for functional devices and structures across scales. Bistable designs are particularly attractive since they endow a single object with two configurations that…
The concept of metamaterials emerged in years 2000 with the achievement of artificial structures enabling non conventional propagation of electromagnetic waves, such as negative phase velocity of negative refraction. The electromagnetic…
There is a growing mechanics literature concerning the macroscopic properties of mechanism-based mechanical metamaterials. This amounts mathematically to a homogenization problem involving nonlinear elasticity. A key goal is to identify the…
Recent advances in active materials and fabrication techniques have enabled the production of cyclically self-deployable metamaterials with an expanded functionality space. However, designing metamaterials that possess continuously tunable…
Typed metagraphs are defined as hypergraphs with types assigned to hyperedges and their targets, and the potential to have targets of hyperedges connect to whole links as well as targets. Directed typed metagraphs (DTMGs) are introduced via…
Spinodal metamaterials, with architectures inspired by natural phase-separation processes, have presented a significant alternative to periodic and symmetric morphologies when designing mechanical metamaterials with extreme performance.…
Defects, and in particular topological defects, are architectural motifs that play a crucial role in natural materials. Here we provide a systematic strategy to introduce such defects in mechanical metamaterials. We first present…
The ability to design passive structures that perform different operations on different electromagnetic fields is key to many technologies, from beam-steering to optical computing. While many techniques have been developed to optimise…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
We present a comprehensive overview of different types of parametric interactions in nonlinear optics which are associated with simultaneous phase-matching of several optical processes in quadratic nonlinear media, the so-called multistep…
At the cutting edge of materials science, matter is designed to self-organize into structures that perform a wide range of functions. The past two decades have witnessed major innovations in the versatility of building blocks, ranging from…
The classification of materials into insulators and conductors has been shaken up by the discovery of topological insulators that conduct robustly at the edge but not in the bulk. In mechanics, designating a material as insulating or…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
Kirigami-inspired metamaterials are attracting increasing interest because of their ability to achieve extremely large strains and shape changes via out-of-plane buckling. While in flat kirigami sheets the ligaments buckle simultaneously as…
Contact planning is crucial in locomoting systems.Specifically, appropriate contact planning can enable versatile behaviors (e.g., sidewinding in limbless locomotors) and facilitate speed-dependent gait transitions (e.g., walk-trot-gallop…
Acoustic metamaterials are artificial structures, often lattice of resonators, with unusual properties. They can be engineered to stop wave propagation in specific frequency bands. Once manufactured, their dispersive qualities remain…
Flexibility governs the many properties of materials and is crucial for the function of proteins and biopolymers. However, how the self-assembly of flexibly bonded particles can lead to larger structures with global reconfigurability is…
Although metamaterials have been widely used for controlling elastic waves through bandgap engineering, the directed guidance of stress waves in non-periodic structures has remained a challenge. This work demonstrates that spatially graded…
Tunable metasurfaces enable active and on-demand control over optical wavefronts through reconfigurable scattering of resonant nanostructures. Here, we present novel insights inspired by mechanical metamaterials to achieve giant tunability…
Honeycomb-like microstructures have been shown to exhibit local elastic buckling under compression, with three possible geometric buckling modes, or pattern transformations. The individual pattern transformations, and consequently also…