Abstract: Geometric frustration prevents simple building blocks from assembling into perfectly ordered structures, but this failure can become a powerful route to complexity and function. In this seminar, I will discuss how frustrated assemblies generate curved, chiral, hierarchical, and otherwise nontrivial structures, and how such structural complexity can be understood through statistical mechanics. I will then connect these ideas to functional materials, including low-density rigid gels and trainable mechanical networks that learn from local physical information. Together, these examples suggest a broader principle: frustration and disorder are not merely defects, but design tools for creating robust, adaptive, and functional materials.
Xiaoming Mao, Professor, University of Michigan
Host: Istvan Kovacs
Joan West
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