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Breaking mechanical holography in combinatorial metamaterials

Chaviva Sirote-Katz1,*, Ofri Palti2, Naomi Spiro3, Tamás Kálmán4,5,†, and Yair Shokef6,7,8,9,5,‡

  • *Contact author: chavivas@mail.tau.ac.il
  • †Contact author: kalman@math.titech.ac.jp
  • ‡Contact author: shokef@tau.ac.il
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033004 – Published 1 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wtgy-8fx1

Abstract

Combinatorial mechanical metamaterials are made of anisotropic, flexible blocks, such that multiple metamaterials may be constructed using a single block type, and the system's response strongly depends on the mutual orientations of the blocks within the lattice. We study a family of possible block types for the square, honeycomb, and cubic lattices. Blocks that are centrally symmetric induce holographic order, such that mechanical compatibility (meaning that blocks do not impede each other's motion) implies bulk-boundary coupling. With them, one can design a compatible metamaterial that will deform in any desired texture only on part of its boundary. With blocks that break holographic order, we demonstrate how to design the deformation texture on the entire boundary. Correspondingly, the number of compatible holographic metamaterials scales exponentially with the boundary, while in nonholographic cases we show that it scales exponentially with the bulk.

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See Also

Defect positioning in combinatorial metamaterials

Chaviva Sirote-Katz, Yotam M. Y. Feldman, Guy Cohen, Tamás Kálmán, and Yair Shokef
Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033005 (2025)

Article Text

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033004– Published 1 July, 2025
  • Received 2 December 2024
  • Accepted 11 June 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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