A soft photopolymer cuboid that computes with binary strings of white light.

Next-generation stimuli-responsive materials must be configured with local computational ability so that instead of a discrete on-off responsiveness, they sense, process and interact reciprocally with environmental stimuli. Because of their varied architectures and tunable responsiveness to a range of physical and chemical stimuli, polymers hold particular promise in the generation of such "materials that compute". Here, we present a photopolymer cuboid that autonomously performs pattern recognition and transfer, volumetric encoding and binary arithmetic with incandescent beams.

Self-Organized Lattices of Nonlinear Optochemical Waves in Photopolymerizable Fluids: The Spontaneous Emergence of 3-D Order in a Weakly Correlated System.

Many of the extraordinary three-dimensional architectures that pattern our physical world emerge from complex nonlinear systems or dynamic populations whose individual constituents are only weakly correlated to each other. Shoals of fish, murmuration behaviors in birds, congestion patterns in traffic, and even networks of social conventions are examples of spontaneous pattern formation, which cannot be predicted from the properties of individual elements alone. Pattern formation at a different scale has been observed or predicted in weakly correlated systems including superconductors, atomic gases near Bose Einstein condensation, and incoherent optical fields.

An optochemically organized nonlinear waveguide lattice with primitive cubic symmetry.

We describe the first example of a primitive cubic lattice assembled spontaneously from three mutually orthogonal and intersecting arrays of cylindrical, multimode waveguides. The lattice is generated in a single, room-temperature step with separate (mutually incoherent) incandescent light bulbs. To demonstrate its potential as a nonlinear photonic lattice, we generated a self-trapped lattice beam of incoherent white light.