Related papers: Sequential Snapping and Pathways in a Mechanical M…

Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…

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…

We study the response to shear of a one-dimensional monolayer embedded between two rigid plates, where the upper one is externally driven. The shear is shown to excite ``shearons'', which are collective modes of the embedded system with…

Advances in scaling down heterostructures and having an improved interface quality together with atomically-thin two-dimensional materials suggest a novel approach to systematically design materials. A given material can be transformed…

The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft robotics,…

We investigate the dissipative mechanisms exhibited by creased material sheets when subjected to mechanical loading, which comes in the form of plasticity and relaxation phenomena within the creases. After demonstrating that plasticity…

Mechanical metamaterials -- structures with unusual properties that emerge from their internal architecture -- that are designed to undergo large deformations typically exploit large internal rotations, and therefore, necessitate the…

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…

Directional locking occurs when a particle moving over a periodic substrate becomes constrained to travel along certain substrate symmetry directions. Such locking effects arise for colloids and superconducting vortices moving over ordered…

The ability to engineer metamaterials with tunable nonlinear optical properties is crucial for nonlinear optics. Traditionally, metals have been employed to enhance nonlinear optical interactions through field localization. Here, inspired…

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…

Models of coupled binary elements capture memory effects in complex dissipative materials, such as transient responses or sequential computing, when their interactions are chosen appropriately. However, for random interactions, self-loops -…

The ability to tune the microstructures formed by block copolymers using accessible physical approaches provides control for practical material applications. A common strategy involves the addition of homopolymers, which can induce…

Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…

The bistability of embedded elements provides a natural route through which to introduce reprogrammability to elastic meta-materials. One example of this is the soft morphable sheet, in which bistable elements that can be snapped up or…

The architecture of mechanical metamaterialsis designed to harness geometry, non-linearity and topology to obtain advanced functionalities such as shape morphing, programmability and one-way propagation. While a purely geometric framework…

Although the invention of the metamaterials has stimulated the interest of many researchers and possesses many important applications, the basic design idea is very simple: composing effective media from many small structured elements and…

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…

Memory effects are ubiquitous in nature and are particularly relevant at the nanoscale where the dynamical properties of electrons and ions strongly depend on the history of the system, at least within certain time scales. We review here…

A concept of a planar modular mechanical metamaterial inspired by the nature's principle of local adaptivity is proposed. The metamaterial consists of identical pieces similar to jigsaw puzzle tiles. Their rotation within assembly provides…