Related papers: Spatiotemporal modulation of surface texture for i…
Studying shape changing thick surfaces induced by differential growth helps us understand morphogenesis in biology and offers opportunities for device design. While ideal 2D differential growth maps have been well studied for both isotropic…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…
Topological transitions are fundamental phenomena in electronics, photonics, and quantum technologies. However, the scalability and tunability of Topological transitions in these systems have still been constrained by their material…
Metasurfaces enable manipulation of light propagation at an unprecedented level, benefitting from a number of merits unavailable to conventional optical elements, such as ultracompactness, precise phase and polarization control at deep…
The spatiotemporal sculpturing of light beams with arbitrary phase and polarization topologies has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to advance optical technologies and reveal novel physical phenomena.…
Soft membranes are commonly employed in shape-morphing applications, where the material is programmed to achieve a target shape upon activation by an external trigger, and as coating layers that alter the surface characteristics of bulk…
Unlocking the potential of terahertz (THz) and millimetre (mm) waves for next generation communications and imaging applications requires reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) with programmable elements that can manipulate the waves in…
A phase retrieval technique using a spatial light modulator (SLM) and a phase diffuser for a fast reconstruction of smooth wave fronts is demonstrated experimentally. Diffuse illumination of a smooth test object with the aid of a phase…
Speckled illumination enhances widefield fluorescence microscopy by enabling optical sectioning and super resolution. In random illumination microscopy, sequences of speckled illumination patterns are used to excite fluorescent samples and…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interactions with…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
Dynamic shape-morphing soft materials systems are ubiquitous in living organisms; they are also of rapidly increasing relevance to emerging technologies in soft machines, flexible electronics, and smart medicines. Soft matter equipped with…
Modulation of metasurfaces in time gives rise to several exotic space-time scattering phenomena by violating the reciprocity and generation of higher-order frequency harmonics. We introduce a new design paradigm for time-modulated…
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a suitable candidate organism for soft-matter robotics because it exhibits controllable transport, movement and guidance behaviour. Physarum may be considered as a smart computing and actuating…
We demonstrate targeting and control over spatiotemporal chaos in an optical feedback loop experiment. Different stationary target patterns are stabilized in real-time by means of a two dimensional space extended perturbation field driven…
Structured illumination enables the tailoring of an imaging device's optical transfer function to enhance resolution. We propose the incorporation of a temporal periodic modulation, specifically a rotating mask, to encode multiple transfer…
Femtosecond laser excitation of materials that exhibit magnetic spin textures promises advanced magnetic control via the generation of ultrafast and non-equilibrium spin dynamics. We explore such possibilities in ferrimagnetic [Fe(0.35…
Twisted bilayer photonic crystals introduce a twist between two stacked photonic crystal slabs, enabling strong modulation of their electromagnetic properties. The change in the twist angle strongly influences the resonant frequencies and…
Skyrmionic textures are being extensively investigated due to the occurrence of novel topological magnetic phenomena and their promising applications in a new generation of spintronic devices that take advantage of the robust topological…