A groundbreaking discovery in metamaterial design reveals materials with built-in deformation resistance and mechanical memory, promising advancements in robotics and computing.
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam Institute of Physics and ENS de Lyon have discovered how to design materials that necessarily have a point or line where the material doesn’t deform under stress, and that even remember how they have been poked or squeezed in the past. These results could be used in robotics and mechanical computers, while similar design principles could be used in quantum computers.
The outcome is a breakthrough in the field of metamaterials: designer materials whose responses are determined by their structure rather than their chemical composition. To construct a metamaterial with mechanical memory, physicists Xiaofei Guo, Marcelo Guzmán, David Carpentier, Denis Bartolo, and Corentin Coulais realized that its design needs to be “frustrated,” and that this frustration corresponds to a new type of order, which they call non-orientable order.
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