Related papers: Inverted and programmable Poynting effects in meta…

Nonlinear metamaterials with tailored mechanical properties have applications in engineering, medicine, robotics, and beyond. While modeling their macromechanical behavior is challenging in itself, finding structure parameters that lead to…

We demonstrate a practical scalable approach to the fabrication of tunable metamaterials. Designed for THz wavelengths, the metamaterial is comprised of polyurethane filled with an array of indium wires using the well-established fiber…

A cylindrical rubber fibre subject to twist will also elongate: a manifestation of Poynting's effect in large strain elasticity. Here, we construct an analogous treatment for an active rubber fibre actuated via an axisymmetric pattern of…

Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…

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…

Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…

The successful commercialization of flexible spintronic devices requires a complete understanding of the impact of external strain on the structural, electronic, and magnetic properties of a system. The impact of bending-induced strain on…

Harnessing artificial optical magnetism requires rather complex two- and three-dimensional structures, examples include split-ring and fishnet metamaterials and nanoparticles with non-trivial magnetic properties. By contrast, dielectric…

We present a monolithic mechanical metamaterial comprising a periodic arrangement of snapping units with tunable tensile behavior. Under tension, the metamaterial undergoes a large extension caused by sequential snap-through instabilities,…

In the manufacturing process of a filler-reinforced composite, the fillers in the matrix are aligned due to the shear flow occurring during the drawing stage, and the interface between the matrix and the fillers form various imperfections…

We demonstrate that the introduction of a subwavelength periodic modulation into a metallic structure strongly modifies the guiding characteristics of the surface plasmon modes supported by the system. Moreover, it is also shown how a new…

Acoustic meta-atoms serve as the building blocks of metamaterials, with linear properties designed to achieve functions such as beam steering, cloaking and focusing. They have also been used to shape the characteristics of incident acoustic…

Mechanical metamaterials utilize geometry to achieve exceptional mechanical properties, including those not typically possible for traditional materials. To achieve these properties, it is necessary to identify the proper structures and…

We investigate how two finite-amplitude, transverse, plane body waves may be superposed to propagate in a deformed hyperelastic incompressible solid. We find that the equations of motion reduce to a well-determined system of partial…

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…

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…

Metamaterials are composite structures whose properties arise from a mesoscale organization of their constituents. Provided this organization occurs on scales smaller than the characteristic lengths associated with their response, it is…

Within a decade of fruitful developments, metamaterials became a prominent area of research, bridging theoretical and applied electrodynamics, electrical engineering and material science. Being man-made structures, metamaterials offer a…

Optical tweezers employing forces produced by light underpin important manipulation tools in many areas of applied and biological physics. Conventional optical tweezers are based on refractive optics, and they require excessive auxiliary…

In this work, we demonstrate that the nonlinear response of certain soft-matter systems can be tailored at will by appropriately engineering their optical polarizability. In particular, we deliberately synthesize stable colloidal…