2019/03/14 by Nidhi Pashine, Daniel Hexner, Andrea J. Liu +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax4215
11 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2019/03/14 · arxiv updated 2020/05/14
Disordered materials are often out of equilibrium and evolve very slowly. This allows a memory of the imposed strains or preparation conditions to be encoded in the material. Here we consider "directed aging", where the elastic properties of a material evolve in the direction defined by its aging history. The evolution to a lower-energy configuration is controlled by steepest decent and affects stressed regions differently from unstressed ones. This process can be considered to be a "greedy algorithm" of Nature. Our experiments and simulations illustrate directed aging in examples in which the material's elasticity evolves as a direct consequence of the imposed deformation; the material itself decides how to evolve in order to produce responses that were not present inherently in the material.