Emergence of large-scale patterns in soft quasicrystals

Abstract

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.