New paper about Stokes regime swimming of liquid crystal elastomer torus

SPM congratulates Zixuan Deng with the publication of his PhD research in Nature Materials journal!

In the paper, Deng et al. report a light-fuelled soft liquid crystal elastomer torus with self-sustained out-of-equilibrium movement. The authors demonstrate the torus’s ability to swim laterally and vertically in the Stokes regime. The torus navigation can be extended to three-dimensional space with full steerability of the swimming direction. These results demonstrate the possibilities enabled by prestrained topological structures towards robotic functions of out-of-equilibrium soft matter. Please find more details in the original publication “Light-steerable locomotion using zero-elastic-energy modes” in the journal Nature Materials.