The ’Rotating Squares’ metamaterial deforms conformally, with the blue grid of right angles remaining at right angles after deformation by a foot-shaped object.
The 'Rotating Squares' metamaterial deforms conformally, with the blue grid of right angles remaining at right angles after deformation by a foot-shaped object. In a new publication in Nature Communications, a team of physicists from Amsterdam, Leiden and Atlanta show how to 'puppeteer' lab-designed metamaterials. By only touching these materials from the outside, they are able to predict and perform precise deformations of the whole material. Puppeteering is the art of pulling and pushing strings and rods to cause a puppet to move in a coordinated fashion. The puppeteer's job is not very different from that of a physicist, engineer, or materials scientist, who commonly seek to convert input forces into resulting motions. When making puppets dance, puppeteers have an advantage over physicists, however: they make use of learned intuition and expertise - rather than mathematics - to coordinate their pushes and pulls in real time. For the physicist, predicting the pronounced (or in more technical terms: nonlinear ) deformations of elastic objects is a difficult game, where progress is slow.
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