Category: Physics

Summary: Finding how strongly shell stiffness disorder must align with prestress before localized shell modes spill into the bulk.

Prestressed shells can host soft vibrational modes concentrated on shell-like regions, but disorder can either preserve or destroy that confinement depending on how it lines up with the prestress pattern. This experiment asks for the threshold at which correlated shell disorder stops supporting shell localization and instead pushes the lowest mode into the bulk.

The model constructs dense symmetric elastic operators with shell structure, applies correlated disorder and prestress bias, and then bisects the correlation strength to locate the delocalization point. Iterative deepening repeats the same threshold logic at larger operator sizes to build a finite-size phase map.

This matters because shell buckling, prestress tuning, and disorder-induced localization are often examined in separate mechanical settings. The experiment ties them together into one spectral threshold problem with a clear output for metamaterial design.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolve with iterative deepening and bisection on disorder-prestress correlation strength.

What is measured: Critical correlation threshold, shell localization score, shell mass fraction, minimum eigenvalue, prestress load, and bracket width.