title: Architecture and coevolution of allosteric materials.
abstract: We introduce a numerical scheme to evolve functional elastic materials that can accomplish a specified mechanical task. In this scheme, the number of solutions, their spatial architectures, and the correlations among them can be computed. As an example, we consider an "allosteric" task, which requires the material to respond specifically to a stimulus at a distant active site. We find that functioning materials evolve a less-constrained trumpet-shaped region connecting the stimulus and active sites, and that the amplitude of the elastic response varies nonmonotonically along the trumpet. As previously shown for some proteins, we find that correlations appearing during evolution alone are sufficient to identify key aspects of this design. Finally, we show that the success of this architecture stems from the emergence of soft edge modes recently found to appear near the surface of marginally connected materials. Overall, our in silico evolution experiment offers a window to study the relationship between structure, function, and correlations emerging during evolution.
authors.affiliation: Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; lyan@kitp.ucsb.edu.
authors.forename: Le
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Riccardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ravasio
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 91501-970 Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
authors.forename: Carolina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Brito
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Matthieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wyart
keywords: disordered materials; evolution; proteins