Soft Matter Seminar: “Tuning Nonlinearities to Facilitate Complex Network Behaviors”

The Syracuse University Physics Department Soft Matter group is pleased to welcome Dr. Lauren Altman, Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Pennsylvania for her talk titled:

“Tuning nonlinearities to facilitate complex network behaviors”

From circuitry to truss structures, the mechanics and dynamics of networks play a large role in our everyday lives. When their constituent elements exhibit nonlinear response functions, networks can collectively perform a wide range of complex behaviors. The ability to tune these responses allows for precise control and design of specific network behaviors. Here we present two experimental examples of these complex behaviors implemented in two different media. In the first, we demonstrate how negative differential electrical resistors act as hysterons and can store binary state information. In the second, we show that a mechanical network of springs can be trained on rest length updates via the coupled learning scheme.