Category: Physics

Summary: Finding how much radial prestress gradient can rescue localized modes destroyed by disorder in shell metamaterials.

In mechanical metamaterials, shell-shaped structures can confine vibrational modes to specific regions. However, manufacturing disorder destroys this confinement. This experiment asks: can a smooth radial prestress gradient restore the confined mode after disorder has disrupted it?

The experiment constructs dense elastic operators with shell geometry, applies correlated disorder to destroy the localized mode, then bisects the prestress gradient magnitude to find the minimum gradient that rescues the shell-confined soft mode.

This maps a rescue threshold that bridges three separate bodies of literature (prestress tuning, shell metamaterials, and disorder-induced delocalization) into a single quantitative finite-size map.

Method: GPU dense eigensolve with iterative deepening. Correlated shell disorder is fixed, then bisection on prestress gradient magnitude.

What is measured: Critical rescue gradient, participation ratio on shell sites, rescue transition sharpness.