seed projects

Stefano Gonella, Ellad B. Tadmor, and David J. Flannigan: Understanding Nanoscale Waves in 2D Heterostructures: A Multi-Scale Approach Enabled by Mechanical Metamaterial Proxies

In this renewal, our objective is to continue our collaborative study of dynamics of 2D materials through mutually-informing simulations and experiments that span and link all important scales of the problem. The key idea is to construct mechanical proxies of complex atomistic layered structures by borrowing architectures, components, and fabrication methods from the design space of acousto-elastic metamaterials. Resorting to mechanical metamaterials shifts the mechanistic understanding of subnanoscale, nanoscale, and microscale systems to macroscopic structures that feature a similar level of morphological and topological complexity, but whose dynamics occupy a scale at which controllable, repeatable, and informative experiments can be carried out. The design of the metamaterial proxies and the translation of macroscale results to microscopic insights is enabled through a bridging layer of highfidelity molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. By approaching the nanomaterials-metamaterials analogy in a new way, a deeper understanding of the atomic to microscale structural dynamics of 2D materials will occur synergistically with the development of a new class of mechanical metamaterials capable of delivering unprecedented multifunctional wave manipulation capabilities.

Funded by the National Science Foundation through the University of Minnesota MRSEC under Award Number DMR-2011401