Related papers: Topological elasticity of flexible structures
Nonlinear elastic metamaterials are known to support a variety of dynamic phenomena that enhance our capacity to manipulate elastic waves. Since these properties stem from complex, subwavelength geometry, full-scale dynamic simulations are…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
The choice of elastic energies for thin plates and shells is an unsettled issue with consequences for much recent modeling of soft matter. Through consideration of simple deformations of a thin body in the plane, we demonstrate that four…
Edge states protected by bulk topology of photonic crystals show robustness against short-range disorder, making robust information transfer possible. Here, topological photonic crystals under long-range deformations are investigated.…
Architected metamaterials such as foams and lattices exhibit a wide range of properties governed by microstructural instabilities and emerging phase transformations. Their macroscopic response--including energy dissipation during impact,…
The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…
We introduce a method to design topological mechanical metamaterials that are not constrained by Newtonian dynamics. The unit cells in a mechanical lattice are subjected to active feedback forces that are processed through autonomous…
Using continuum elasticity theory, we describe the elastic behavior of helical coils with an asymmetric double-helix structure and identify conditions, under which they become very rigid. Theoretical insight gained for macro-structures…
The mechanical response of naturally abundant amorphous solids such as gels, jammed grains, and biological tissues are not described by the conventional paradigm of broken symmetry that defines crystalline elasticity. In contrast, the…
Networks of elastic beams can deform either by stretching or bending of their members. The primary mode of deformation (bending or stretching) crucially depends on the specific details of the network architecture. In order to shed light on…
Plasticity is inherent to many engineering materials such as metals. While it can degrade the load-carrying capacity of structures via material yielding, it can also protect structures through plastic energy dissipation. To fully harness…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
One of the hallmarks of topological insulators is the correspondence between the value of its bulk topological invariant and the number of topologically protected edge modes observed in a finite-sized sample. This bulk-boundary…
Combining topology and plasmonics paradigms in nanocolloidal systems may enable new means of pre-engineering desired composite material properties. Here we design and realize orientationally ordered assemblies of noble metal nanoparticles…
Architecting mechanisms of damage in metamaterials by leveraging lattice topology and geometry poses a vital yet complex challenge, essential for engineering desirable mechanical responses. Of these metamaterials, Maxwell lattices, which…
Topological insulators are crystalline materials that have revolutionized our ability to control wave transport. They provide us with unidirectional channels that are immune to obstacles, defects or local disorder, and can even survive some…
There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…
We study the elastic theory of amorphous solids made of particles with finite range interactions in the thermodynamic limit. For the elastic theory to exist one requires all the elastic coefficients, linear and nonlinear, to attain a finite…
We study the topological dynamics by iterations of a piecewise continuous, non linear and locally contractive map in a real finite dimensional compact ball. We consider those maps satisfying the "separation property": different continuity…