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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…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
We create mechanical metamaterials whose response to uniaxial compression can be programmed by lateral confinement, allowing monotonic, non-monotonic and hysteretic behavior. These functionalities arise from a broken rotational symmetry…
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…
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…
Recent advances in meta-optics have enabled diverse functionalities in compact optical devices; however, conventional forward design approaches become inadequate as device complexity and scale grow. Inverse design offers a powerful…
Multishape metamaterials exhibit more than one target shape change, e.g. the same metamaterial can have either a positive or negative Poisson's ratio. So far, multishape metamaterials have mostly been obtained by trial-and-error. The…
Mechanical metamaterials composed of bistable elements have recently emerged as promising platforms for mechanical memory. Traditional approaches to writing information in these systems typically rely on localized actuation or predefined…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…
Multi-step pathways, constituted of a sequence of reconfigurations, are central to a wide variety of natural and man-made systems. Such pathways autonomously execute in self-guided processes such as protein folding and self-assembly, but…
Active learning has been increasingly applied to screening functional materials from existing materials databases with desired properties. However, the number of known materials deposited in the popular materials databases such as ICSD and…
Elastic metamaterials are often designed for a single permanent function. We explore the possibility of altering a material's function repeatedly through a self-organization, "training" process, controlled by applied strains. We show that…
One emerging approach for the fabrication of complex architectures on the nanoscale is to utilize particles customized to intrinsically self-assemble into a desired structure. Inverse methods of statistical mechanics have proven…
Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…
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…
Understanding how nano- or micro-scale structures and material properties can be optimally configured to attain specific functionalities remains a fundamental challenge. Photonic metasurfaces, for instance, can be spectrally tuned through…
Nature-inspired stochastic metamaterials with disordered and multiscale architectures have shown great promise towards extraordinary functionalities, including high mechanical resilience, stress modulation and biased stiffness…
Designing and fabricating structures with specific mechanical properties requires understanding the intricate relationship between design parameters and performance. Understanding the design-performance relationship becomes increasingly…
Emerging multi-material 3D printing techniques have paved the way for the rational design of metamaterials with not only complex geometries but also arbitrary distributions of multiple materials within those geometries. Varying the spatial…
Inverse design techniques in the context of nanophotonics have helped in discovery of compact and counter-intuitive structures/shapes. We introduce the concept of spectral domain inverse design to search through the optical trade-space…