Nat Commun. 2026 Apr 22. doi: 10.1038/s41467-026-71816-y. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
We report the experimental observations of large-scale pattern formation in soft quasicrystals activated by mechanical loading. The soft material system utilizes localized transformations to give rise to large-scale organized patterns. The complex multiscale mechanisms lead to an initial loss of microscale quasicrystalline order, which ultimately reemerges in the large-scale patterns with rotational symmetry. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting large-scale patterns can be pre-designed by fine-tuning initial local chirality and porosity at small length scales. Furthermore, different initial configurations result in patterns exhibiting high shape similarity, with characteristic lengths falling within a discrete sequence governed by the silver ratio. This experimentally observed phenomenon opens a new class of transformative materials with switchable self-similarity propagating across length scales.
PMID:42014720 | DOI:10.1038/s41467-026-71816-y
