Structural materials articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Article |

    As amorphous solids, glasses and gels are similar, but the origins of their different elastic properties are unclear. Simulations now suggest differing free-energy-minimizing pathways: structural ordering for glasses and interface reduction for gels.

    • Yinqiao Wang
    • , Michio Tateno
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • 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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Experiments probing three-dimensional crack propagation show that the critical strain energy needed to drive a crack is directly proportional to its geodesic length. This insight is a step towards a fully three-dimensional theory of crack propagation.

    • Xinyue Wei
    • , Chenzhuo Li
    •  & John M. Kolinski

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    The near-zero thermal expansion of Invar alloy Fe65Ni35 is technologically important but still unexplained. Measurements show that this phenomenon can be explained by the cancellation of magnetic and phonon contributions to the alloy’s entropy.

    • Ralf Röhlsberger

  • Article |

    Glasses relax internally even when their structure is frozen. Observations of a two-dimensional glass former now show that although structure relaxation freezes with the glass transition, non-constrained bonds survive; this accounts for persisting internal relaxation.

    • Yanshuang Chen
    • , Zefang Ye
    •  & Peng Tan

  • Article |

    The relation between physical properties and structure in amorphous materials is poorly understood. Simulations now show that vibrations of string-like dynamical defects likely govern the low-temperature dynamics in these systems.

    • Yuan-Chao Hu
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • 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

  • Perspective |

    The interplay of topological properties and non-Hermitian symmetry breaking has been implemented for a range of classical-wave systems. Recent advances, challenges and opportunities are reviewed across the different physical platforms.

    • Corentin Coulais
    • , Romain Fleury
    •  & Jasper van Wezel

  • 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

  • Article |

    Neutron and X-ray scattering experiments show that the partly disordered material CsNiCrF6 supports multiple Coulomb phases with structural and magnetic properties dictated by underlying local gauge symmetry.

    • T. Fennell
    • , M. J. Harris
    •  & S. T. Bramwell

  • 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 |

    Acoustic Weyl points are realized in a three-dimensional chiral phononic crystal that breaks inversion symmetry, with the topological nature of the associate surface states providing robust modes that propagate along only one direction.

    • Feng Li
    • , Xueqin Huang
    •  & Zhengyou Liu

  • News & Views |

    That the unit cell of a metamaterial can't be considered vanishingly small like in ordinary crystals has long been deemed more burden than opportunity. The emergence of a characteristic length scale in metamaterial chains may change that trend.

    • Muamer Kadic
    • , Tobias Frenzel
    •  & Martin Wegener

  • Measure for Measure |

    Temperature measurement standards rely on highly reproducible states of matter — including eutectic points, as Jonathan Pearce explains.

    • Jonathan Pearce

  • 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

  • Review Article |

    For achieving proper safety and efficiency of future fusion power plants, low-activation materials able to withstand the extreme fusion conditions are needed. Here, the irradiation physics at play and fusion materials research is reviewed.

    • J. Knaster
    • , A. Moeslang
    •  & T. Muroga

  • Research Highlights |

    • Bart Verberck

  • Letter |

    Realizing non-trivial topological effects is challenging in acoustic systems. It is now shown that inversion symmetry breaking can be used to create acoustic analogues of the topological Haldane model.

    • Meng Xiao
    • , Wen-Jie Chen
    •  & C. T. Chan

  • Article |

    Solids embedded with fluid inclusions are intuitively softer than their pure counterparts. But experiments show that when the droplets are small enough, material can become stiffer—highlighting a role for surface tension.

    • Robert W. Style
    • , Rostislav Boltyanskiy
    •  & Eric R. Dufresne

  • 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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