Description:

Many driven systems in condensed matter, such as sheared amorphous solids, compressed crumpled sheets, and disordered magnets, undergo complex sequences of transitions among a multitude of metastable states. These systems are often modeled as collections of bistable elements, or hysterons, which switch between two states depending on the history of an applied driving field. Even when hysterons in the system act independently, the resulting sequence of state transitions can generate important collective phenomena such as return point memory. Introducing interactions between hysterons, however, greatly enriches the possible behaviors, giving rise to multiperiodic orbits, scrambling, avalanches, and transient memory.

Beyond their role in understanding disordered materials, hysteron systems have emerged as a promising framework for designing metamaterials that can encode memory and computation. A central challenge in realizing such targeted memory-storing capabilities is determining how material parameters shape the system’s collective dynamics. In this talk, I will show how tools from catastrophe theory can be used to understand and determine the transition pathways of a system of interacting hysterons under global field driving, and I will outline strategies for designing metamaterials capable of encoding targeted memory and computational functionalities.

Gentian Muhaxheri, PhD Student, Syracuse University

Host: Istvan Kovacs