The engineering of optical and acoustic material functionalities via construction of ordered local and global architectures on various length scales commensurate with and well below the characteristic length scales of photons and phonons in the material is an indispensable and powerful means to develop novel materials. In the current mature status of photonics, polymers hold a pivotal role in various application areas such as light-emission, sensing, energy, and displays, with exclusive advantages despite their relatively low dielectric constants. Moreover, in the nascent field of phononics, polymers are expected to be a superior material platform due to the ability for readily fabricated complex polymer structures possessing a wide range of mechanical behaviors, complete phononic bandgaps, and resonant architectures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report a fully reversible and robust shape-memory effect in a two-dimensional nanoscale periodic structure composed of three steps, the elastic instability governing the transformation, the plasticity that locks in the transformed pattern as a result of an increase in glass transition temperature (T(g)), and the subsequent elastic recovery due to the vapor-induced decrease in T(g). Solvent swelling of a cross-linked epoxy/air cylinder structure induces an elastic instability that causes a reversible change in the shape of the void regions from circular to oval. The pattern symmetry changes from symmorphic p6mm to nonsymmorphic p2gg brought via the introduction of new glide symmetry elements and leads to a significant change in the phononic band structure, specifically in the opening of a new narrow-band gap due to anticrossing of bands, quite distinct from gaps originating from typical Bragg scattering.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a new route for the fabrication of highly nonspherical complex multivalent submicron particles. This technique exploits the ability of holographic interference lithography to control geometrical elements such as symmetry and volume fraction in 3D lattices on the submicron scale. Colloidal particles with prescribed complex concave shapes are obtained by cleaving low volume fraction connected structures fabricated by interference lithography.
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