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Metamaterials have been a major research area for more than two decades now, involving artificial structures with predesigned electromagnetic properties constructed from deep subwavelength building blocks. They have been used to demonstrate…
Metasurfaces are promising two-dimensional metamaterials that are engineered to provide unique properties or functionalities absent in naturally occurring homogeneous surfaces. Here, we report a type of metasurface for tailored…
We design, simulate and experimentally characterise a reconfigurable elastic metamaterial with beyond-nearest-neighbour (BNN) coupling. The structure is composed from the popular British model construction system, Meccano$^{\text{TM}}$. The…
We present a theory for the interaction between active particles and a passive flexible membrane. By explicitly solving for the pressure exerted by the active particles, we show that they reduce the membrane tension and bending modulus 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…
One characteristic feature of soft matter systems is their strong response to external stimuli. As a consequence they are comparatively easily driven out of their ground state and out of equilibrium, which leads to many of their fascinating…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
An efficient reflective elastic metasurface with tunable focusing point is proposed. The metasurface is based on electric resonators embedded in a stretchable elastic substrate. The focal length is controlled by mean of the stretching…
The field of metamaterial research revolves around the idea of creating artificial media that interact with light in a way unknown from naturally occurring materials. This is commonly achieved by creating sub-wavelength lattices of…
By coupling controllable quantum systems into larger structures we introduce the concept of a quantum metamaterial. Conventional meta-materials represent one of the most important frontiers in optical design, with applications in diverse…
Physical systems exhibiting neuromechanical functions promise to enable structures with directly encoded autonomy and intelligence. We report on a class of neuromorphic metamaterials embodying bioinspired mechanosensing, memory, and…
The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.
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…
Multilayer metasurfaces (MLMs) represent a versatile type of three-dimensional optical metamaterials that could enable ultra-thin and multi-functional photonic components. Herein we demonstrate an approach to readily fabricate MLMs…
Designing reconfigurable materials based on deformable nanoparticles (NPs) hinges on an understanding of the energetically-favored shapes these NPs can adopt. Using simulations, we show that hollow, deformable patchy NPs tailored with…
Active metamaterials are engineered structures that possess novel properties that can be changed after the point of manufacture. Their novel properties arise predominantly from their physical structure, as opposed to their chemical…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…
Entangled matter provides intriguing perspectives in terms of deformation mechanisms, mechanical properties, assembly and disassembly. However, collective entanglement mechanisms are complex, occur over multiple length scales, and they are…
When an amorphous material is strained beyond the point of yielding it enters a state of continual reconfiguration via dissipative, avalanche-like slip events that relieve built-up local stress. However, how the statistics of such events…
We report the design and testing of a tunable and nonlinear mechanical metamaterial, called locally resonant granular chain. It consists of a one-dimensional array of hollow spherical particles in contact, containing local resonators. The…