A more reliable way to make the computer chips of the future
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 17-Jun-2026 10:15 ET (17-Jun-2026 14:15 GMT/UTC)
Amorphous or disordered materials can “remember” past mechanical experiences. Until now, scientists believed that such memories form mainly under perfectly repetitive deformation, where materials are gently trained through predictable back-and-forth motion over many cycles. New research from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad, in collaboration with researchers in ESPCI Paris, France and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, challenges this conventional picture.
Think about a new pair of shoes or jeans. At first, they may feel stiff and uncomfortable. But after months of everyday use, they begin to fit just right, almost as if they have adapted to the body shape of their user. This change does not happen through perfectly repeated movements — we walk, bend, twist, and move unpredictably. Yet these materials still adjust and “remember.” Inspired by this everyday observation, the researchers asked a simple but fundamental question: do materials really need perfectly repeated deformation to form memory, or can they learn from random experiences as well?
Using large-scale computer simulations, the researchers discovered that disordered materials can indeed form precise mechanical memories even when subjected to random deformation. Instead of repeatedly deforming the material in a perfectly regular way, they “trained” it using irregular back-and-forth deformation within a fixed amplitude and later tested whether the material retained this memory.
Remarkably, the material returned to the same state only when the test deformation matched the original training amplitude, showing that it had retained a precise memory despite the randomness of the driving. The researchers also found an important limit: memory forms only below the material’s yielding point, beyond which the material starts to break and the memory is lost.
The findings, published in the New Journal of Physics, bring scientific understanding of material memory closer to the irregular conditions found in everyday life.
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