Nanowerk  April 4, 2024 Traditionally the building blocks of metamaterials are arranged in fixed positions within a lattice structure. An international team of researchers (USA – Harvard University, Israel) showed that by mixing highly deformable spherical capsules into an incompressible fluid, it is possible to realize a ‘metafluid’ with programmable compressibility, optical behaviour, and viscosity. Experimentally and numerically, they demonstrated that the buckling of the shells endows the fluid with a highly nonlinear behaviour. They harnessed this behaviour to develop smart robotic systems, highly tunable logic gates and optical elements with switchable characteristics. They demonstrated that the collapse of the […]