Physics Colloquium: How geometry and topology make materials rigid or floppy

Physics Colloquium
How geometry and topology make materials rigid or floppy

Dr. Chris Santangelo
Professor, Physics
Syracuse University

Event Details: The materials of biology, from sharkskin to cartilage to wood, regularly out-perform their synthetic equivalents. Organisms can achieve this because their materials have precise geometric structures that endow them with tailored mechanical properties that can often be changed in situ. It has recently become possible to fabricate comparable structures through 3D printing, but we still seem to understand little about how geometry and mechanics are intertwined. This talk will discuss why this is a hard problem (NP-hard actually) and highlight new work by my group and collaborators that are starting to unveil new connections between geometry and mechanics. This new understanding has allowed us to design materials that can change their mechanical properties, changing from rigid to floppy due to the imposition of internal stresses.

Bio: Christian Santangelo received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He completed his postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2007. In 2006, he received the Glenn H. Brown Prize from the International Liquid Crystal Society. He joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an assistant professor. In 2019, he joined the faculty of Syracuse University, where he is currently a professor of Physics. Throughout his career, Santangelo has received numerous awards and honors, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Early Career Award from the APS Division of Soft Matter (DSOFT), and election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2024, he received the William Wasserstrom Prize from Syracuse University. His research interests span soft condensed-matter physics, materials geometry, extreme mechanics, 4D printing and self-folding origami, mechanical metamaterials, and topological effects in nonlinear systems.

Intended Audience:
All are Welcome!

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