Sommaire:

Memory effects in disordered matter – granular suspensions, ferromagnets, crumpled paper…– can be described as pathways between the different states visited by the system upon driving. However, due to their complexity, we lack strategy to experimentally probe, understand and control such pathways in most memory forming systems.

We introduce mechanical driving of corrugated elastic sheets to precisely observe and manipulate complex, multi-step pathways. These systems respond to simple 1D forcing via sequences of elastic snap-through instabilities, leading to complex– yet controlled–deformation pathways, reminiscent of memory effects. In particular we use manipulations of the boundaries to elicit a multitude of pathways from a single sample, and show how interactions between the instabilities lead to new pathways, akin to information processing.

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