Wave coarsening in odd elastic metamaterials

Spatiotemporal patterns are ubiquitous in nature and often responsible for biological functionalities such as locomotion, signalling and communication.

In order to cope with complex and changing environments, a robust pattern forming system must be able to adjust its pattern when circumstances demand it.

Here we create synthetic odd elastic solids that exhibit strain wave patterns which coarsen over time.

When exchanging momentum with a substrate the coarsening process is arrested at a wavelength dependent on the activity of the system

This mechanism allows our active solids to exhibit adaptive locomotion and suggests how materials with multistable patterns can be leveraged for shape changing, crawling, and swimming.