Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Jul 17;115(29):7509-7514. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1722342115. Epub 2018 Jul 2.
We describe a minimal realization of reversibly programmable matter in the form of a featureless smooth elastic plate that has the capacity to store information in a Braille-like format as a sequence of stable discrete dimples. Simple experiments with cylindrical and spherical shells show that we can control the number, location, and the temporal order of these dimples, which can be written and erased at will. Theoretical analysis of the governing equations in a specialized setting and numerical simulations of the complete equations allow us to characterize the phase diagram for the formation of these localized elastic states, elastic bits (e-bits), consistent with our observations. Given that the inherent bistability and hysteresis in these low-dimensional systems arise exclusively due to the geometrical-scale separation, independent of material properties or absolute scale, our results might serve as alternate approaches to small-scale mechanical memories.
我们以无特征的光滑弹性板的形式展示了一种可还原可编程物质的最小实现方式，该板具有以盲文格式存储信息的能力，即将一系列稳定的离散压痕作为信息序列。使用圆柱形和球形外壳进行的简单实验表明，我们可以控制这些压痕的数量、位置和时间顺序，并且可以随意写入和擦除它们。在特殊设置下对控制方程的理论分析以及对完整方程的数值模拟，使我们能够对这些局部弹性状态（弹性位元，e-bit）的形成的相图进行特征化，与我们的观察结果一致。鉴于这些低维系统中固有的双稳性和滞后现象完全是由于几何尺度分离引起的，与材料特性或绝对尺度无关，因此我们的结果可能成为小型机械记忆的替代方法。
