LMP Seminar: Discrete Descriptions of Mechanical Metamaterials: from Spin Glass to Spin Ice

Metamaterials are artificial structures made of arrays of multiple building blocks of mesoscopic length scales. For many mechanical metamaterials, the possible geometric states of each building block may be linked to discrete spin states of a magnetic system. I will show how designing the building blocks and their mutual spatial arrangement in a metamaterial enables much flexibility in setting the interactions in the corresponding spin system. This control of the frustration and the topological features of the spin system leads to novel functionalities such as response to predefined mechanical textures, spatial steering of stress and deformation fields, and multiple coexisting steady states.