Controlled pathways in corrugated sheets

Memory effects in disordered matter – granular suspensions, spin-glasses or crumpled paper - can be described via pathways between distinct states visited by the system upon driving. However, we lack experimental strategies to probe, understand and control such pathways.
Here we introduce mechanical driving of corrugated elastic sheets to precisely observe and manipulate complex, multi-step pathways. In particular we use tilting of the boundaries to elicit a multitude of pathways from a single sample. Strikingly, these include “scrambled” pathways, which provide compelling evidence of the effect of interactions on pathways. This work provides a new avenue to study memory and pathways in complex matter.