Surface Actuation and Sensing of a Tensegrity Structure Using Robotic Skins.

Tensegrity robots comprising solid rods connected by tensile cables are of interest due to their flexible and robust nature, which potentially makes them suitable for uneven and unpredictable environments where traditional robots often struggle. Much progress has been made toward attaining locomotion with tensegrity robots. However, measuring the shape of a dynamic tensegrity without the use of external hardware remains a challenge.

OmniSkins: Robotic skins that turn inanimate objects into multifunctional robots.

Robots generally excel at specific tasks in structured environments but lack the versatility and the adaptability required to interact with and locomote within the natural world. To increase versatility in robot design, we present robotic skins that can wrap around arbitrary soft bodies to induce the desired motions and deformations. Robotic skins integrate actuation and sensing into a single conformable material and may be leveraged to create a multitude of controllable soft robots with different functions or gaits to accommodate the demands of different environments.

Pseudogap phase of cuprate superconductors confined by Fermi surface topology.

The properties of cuprate high-temperature superconductors are largely shaped by competing phases whose nature is often a mystery. Chiefly among them is the pseudogap phase, which sets in at a doping p* that is material-dependent. What determines p* is currently an open question.

Direct measurement of the upper critical field in cuprate superconductors.

In the quest to increase the critical temperature Tc of cuprate superconductors, it is essential to identify the factors that limit the strength of superconductivity. The upper critical field Hc2 is a fundamental measure of that strength, yet there is no agreement on its magnitude and doping dependence in cuprate superconductors. Here we show that the thermal conductivity can be used to directly detect Hc2 in the cuprates YBa2Cu3Oy, YBa2Cu4O8 and Tl2Ba2CuO6+δ, allowing us to map out Hc2 across the doping phase diagram.

Broken rotational symmetry in the pseudogap phase of a high-T(c) superconductor.

The nature of the pseudogap phase is a central problem in the effort to understand the high-transition-temperature (high-T(c)) copper oxide superconductors. A fundamental question is what symmetries are broken when the pseudogap phase sets in, which occurs when the temperature decreases below a value T*. There is evidence from measurements of both polarized neutron diffraction and the polar Kerr effect that time-reversal symmetry is broken, but at temperatures that differ significantly from one another.