In the Physical Review Letters work, the NYU researchers created “metamaterials,” which are engineered materials with properties stemming from their structure rather than their chemical nature. However, a challenge in creating metamaterials is first understanding how their structure gives rise to physical properties of interest.
To address these challenges, the scientists developed an algorithm to design disordered structures that were functional. In doing so, they discovered a novel form of “correlated disorder”—materials that are neither fully disordered nor fully ordered.
“Think of trees in a forest—they grow at random positions, but not completely random because they’re usually a certain distance from one another,” explains Martiniani. “This new pattern, gyromorphs, combines properties that we believed to be incompatible and displays a function that outperforms all ordered alternatives, including quasicrystals.”
The researchers noticed that every single isotropic bandgap material had a structural signature in common.
“We wanted to make this structural signature as pronounced as possible,” adds Mathias Casiulis, a postdoctoral fellow in NYU’s Department of Physics and the paper’s lead author. “The result was a new class of materials—gyromorphs—that reconcile seemingly incompatible features.
“This is because gyromorphs don’t have a fixed, repeating structure like a crystal, which gives them a liquid-like disorder, but, at the same time, if you look at them from a distance they form regular patterns. These properties work together to create bandgaps that lightwaves can’t penetrate from any direction.”
Reference: Casiulis M, Shih A, Martiniani S. Gyromorphs: a new class of functional disordered materials. Phys Rev Lett. 2025;135(19):196101. doi: 10.1103/gqrx-7mn2
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