Mechanical properties articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • News & Views |

    The shape and trajectory of a crack plays a crucial role in material fracture. High-precision experiments now directly capture this phenomenon, unveiling the intricate 3D nature of cracks.

    • Michael D. Bartlett

  • News & Views |

    When cracks creep forward in our three-dimensional world, they do so because of accompanying cracks racing perpendicular to the main direction of motion with almost sonic speed. Clever experiments have now directly demonstrated this phenomenon.

    • Michael Marder

  • News & Views |

    Permanent deformation in solids results from atoms not aligning with the external stress causing the deformation. Detecting such non-affine atomic rearrangements and connecting them to measurable mechanical effects is now shown to be feasible by means of high-energy X-ray diffraction.

    • Saswati Ganguly

  • News & Views |

    Disordered systems that are far from equilibrium relax slowly towards their equilibrium. Now, we learn that the irreversible plastic deformations that form the wrinkles of a crumpled sheet result in a complex energy landscape that ages logarithmically.

    • Kari Dalnoki-Veress

  • Article |

    Many complex systems relax slowly towards equilibrium after a perturbation, without ever reaching it. Experiments with crumpled sheets now show that these relaxations involve intermittent avalanches of localized instabilities, whose slow-down leads to logarithmic aging.

    • Dor Shohat
    • , Yaniv Friedman
    •  & Yoav Lahini

  • Article |

    Whether and when a material deforms elastically or plastically depends on its microstructure. Experiments on two-dimensional colloidal systems show that in disordered materials, packing density, stress and a microstructure-related entropy govern deformations.

    • K. L. Galloway
    • , E. G. Teich
    •  & P. E. Arratia

  • Article |

    The structures of stingers of living organisms are surprisingly similar despite their vastly different lengths. Now, stingers are found to obey a unifying mechanistic principle that characterizes the stingers resistance to buckling.

    • Kaare H. Jensen
    • , Jan Knoblauch
    •  & Keunhwan Park

  • Letter |

    In natural materials, defects determine many properties. In spin-analogue mechanical metamaterials, deterministically inserted topological defects enable the design of complex deformation and stress distributions.

    • Anne S. Meeussen
    • , Erdal C. Oğuz
    •  & Martin van Hecke

  • News & Views |

    The mechanics of many materials can be modelled by a network of balls connected by springs. A bottom-up approach based on differential geometry now captures changes in mechanics upon network growth or merger, going beyond the linear deformation regime.

    • A. Souslov
    •  & V. Vitelli

  • News & Views |

    Artificial magnetic fields have been constructed in 2D and 3D acoustic structures to manipulate sound, in much the same way as Dirac and Weyl fermions respond to magnetic fields in their quantum levels.

    • Baile Zhang

  • Letter |

    Axial fields couple to the states of different chiralities with opposite signs. In an acoustic Weyl system, the implementation of such fields induces chiral Landau levels, which is now observed experimentally.

    • Valerio Peri
    • , Marc Serra-Garcia
    •  & Sebastian D. Huber

  • News & Views |

    The ideas of topology are breaking ground in origami-based metamaterials. Experiments now show that certain shapes — doughnuts included — exhibit topological bistability, and can be made to click between different topologically stable states.

    • Scott R. Waitukaitis

  • Letter |

    Origami-inspired metamaterial design gives rise to structures with kinematic properties dictated by the topology of their configuration space. The approach allows for well-defined metamaterial properties even in the presence of unpredictable forces.

    • Bin Liu
    • , Jesse L. Silverberg
    •  & Itai Cohen

  • Research Highlight |

    • Andreas H. Trabesinger

  • Letter |

    The elastic energy built up during peptide self-assembly is exploited in the realization of a microactuator. The energy stored is released on millisecond timescales via a buckling instability controlled with droplet microfluidics.

    • Aviad Levin
    • , Thomas C. T. Michaels
    •  & Tuomas P. J. Knowles

  • News & Views |

    The concept of an evolving jamming density explains a multitude of mechanisms in granular matter. Simulations of systems with friction now consolidate this notion and highlight that the jamming point is a variable that can move in various ways whenever the system is deformed.

    • Stefan Luding

  • Research Highlights |

    • Bart Verberck

  • News & Views |

    The jury's still out on how glasses and other disordered materials form. However, a new framework suggests that we can understand their mechanical properties without this information, by using the physics of jamming.

    • Giulio Biroli

  • Letter |

    Jammed systems are typically thought of as being amorphous. Simulations of packings with varying disorder reveal a crossover from crystalline behaviour, which suggests the physics of jamming also applies to highly ordered systems—providing a new framework for understanding amorphous solids.

    • Carl P. Goodrich
    • , Andrea J. Liu
    •  & Sidney R. Nagel

  • News & Views |

    Friction involves a complex set of phenomena spanning a large range of length scales, but experiments assessing the evolution of the slip-front between two dry sliding bodies now reveal that slip can be reasonably well described by linear fracture mechanics theory.

    • Robert W. Carpick
    •  & Roland Bennewitz

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