Roll up your sleeves

When you push up your sleeves, wrinkles form, which eventually evolve into ridges (pictured). As familiar as you may be with this phenomenon, have you ever thought about its underlying mechanism? It involves the complex nonlinear mechanical behaviour of large deformations and surface instabilities, which in turn give rise to a sophisticated morphological evolution. And now, Yifan Yang and co-workers have revealed a hitherto unknown post-buckling behaviour that involves multiple bifurcation transitions (Phys. Rev. Lett. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.215503; 2018)...

Understanding the nonlinear morphological transitions of soft matter holds potential for multifunctional surface fabrication, and hence widespread applications. Roll up your sleeves, there is more work to do in this area.

Nature Physics 14, 534 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0178-9

Physical Review Letters 120, 215503 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.215503