Related papers: A biomimetic feedback loop for sustaining self-lub…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
Smart surfaces that reversibly change the interfacial friction coefficients in response to external stimuli enable a wide range of applications, such as grips, seals, brake pads, packaging films, and fabrics. Here a new concept of such a…
Living things enact control of non-equilibrium, dynamical structures through complex biochemical networks, accomplishing spatiotemporally-orchestrated physiological tasks such as cell division, motility, and embryogenesis. While the exact…
Frictional losses are responsible for significant energy waste in many practical applications, and superlubricity with a coefficient of friction lower than 0.01 is the goal of tribologists. In this paper, metal-on-polymer contact was…
Friction in ordered atomistic layers plays a central role in various nanoscale systems ranging from nanomachines to biological systems. It governs transport properties, wear and dissipation. Defects and incommensurate lattice constants…
While most of the studies on molecular machines have been performed in solution, interfacing these supramolecular systems with solid-state nanostructures and materials is very important in view of their utilization in sensing components…
Nanomechanical devices can operate at much higher speeds than their macroscopic analogues, due to low inertia. For example, peak speeds >100m/s have been predicted for carbon nanotube devices. This stimulates our interest in the…
The concept of superlubricity has recently called upon notable interest after the demonstration of ultralow friction between atomistically smooth surfaces in layered materials. However, the energy dissipation process conditioning the…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Atomic structures of nanomaterials are inherently dynamic, continuously reshaped through interactions with chemical species and external stimuli. Such dynamics are further amplified as the size and dimensionality of nanomaterials are…
Nanometallic devices based on amorphous insulator-metal thin films are developed to provide a novel non-volatile resistance-switching random-access memory (RRAM). In these devices, data recording is controlled by a bipolar voltage, which…
Resistive random-access memories, also known as memristors, whose resistance can be modulated by the electrically driven formation and disruption of conductive filaments within an insulator, are promising candidates for neuromorphic…
Active particles locally transduce energy into motion, leading to unusual and emergent behaviors. However, current synthetic particles lack sensing and adaptation mechanisms. Here, we demonstrate a novel regulation pathway, through the…
Realizing tunable functional materials with built-in nanoscale heat flow directionality represents a significant challenge that could advance thermal management strategies. Here we use spatiotemporally-resolved thermoreflectance to…
Friction is the essential mediator of terrestrial locomotion, yet in robotic systems it is almost always treated as a passive property fixed by surface materials and conditions. Here, we introduce ultrasonic lubrication as a method to…
We have developed a fast, yet highly reproducible method to fabricate metallic electrodes with nanometer separation using electromigration (EM). We employ four-terminal instead of two-terminal devices in combination with an analog feedback…
A correlation is established between the macro-scale friction regimes of metals and a transition between two dominant atomistic mechanisms of deformation. Metals tend to exhibit bi-stable friction behavior -- low and converging or high and…
Nanomechanical photonic metamaterials provide a wealth of active switching, nonlinear and enhanced light-matter interaction functionalities by coupling optically and mechanically resonant subsystems. Thermal (Brownian) motion of the…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…