Ultrasonic metamaterials offer myriad possibilities in sensing, communication, and imaging. However, these man-made, artificial phononic composites operating at high frequencies (MHz-GHz) are subject to several major limitations, including manufacturing scalability, fragility, sustainability, and biocompatibility. There is a strong need to develop such phononic materials using robust and biocompatible composites that can be inexpensively self-assembled, thus enabling economic and sustainable manufacturing routes. We propose to use genetically-tailorable plant structures to design MHz-GHz ultrasonic metamaterials at the micro and nanoscales.
Our team recently demonstrated that decellularized plant cells, extracted from onion epidermises, behave as locally resonant metamaterials, exhibiting sub-GHz phononic bandgaps [1]. By selecting plant cells at various growth stage, we showed that the features of the gaps can be phenotypically controlled. In these experiments, wild-type plant cells were studied using laser-generated ultrasonic waves. Building upon these recent findings, the candidate will 1) develop new opto-acoustic setups to study the generation and detection of ultrasonic waves in plant-derived metamaterials, 2) perform numerical simulations of elastic wave propagation in microstructured materials, 3) investigate mechanical tunability of the MHz-GHz phononic response of plant metamaterials via anisotropy and nonlinearity.
The field of biological composites is expanding rapidly with applications in photonics, soft robotics and human augmentation, but has not yet met phononics. This project should be the start of a new research area of what we call “biophoNonics”, whereby biological materials are not copied, but are genetically engineered, harvested and used as phononic materials. In the years to come, we believe that the ability to tailor the genome by controlled mutations or gene editing in plants could provide a plausible, scalable, sustainable manufacturing route for future phononic materials design.
Local collaborative network : The student will work at ILM in the Biophysics team. She/he will be supervised by Thomas Dehoux and Maroun Abi Ghanem. The preparation of the plant samples will be developed in collaboration with the team of our collaborator, Olivier Hamant from the lab Reproduction et Développement des Plantes (RDP ).
Requirements: Candidates should have a background in physics, acoustics, or optics. Experience with microscopy, finite element analysis, and biomaterials is a plus.
Keywords: bio-derived materials, plants, phonons, metamaterials, laser ultrasound.
Expected duration of the thesis: 48 months
References:
1 M. Abi Ghanem, L. Khoryati, R. Behrou, A. Khanolkar, S. Raetz, F. Allein, N. Boechler, and T. Dehoux, "Growing Phenotype-controlled phononic materials from plant cells scaffolds", Applied Materials Today, 22, 100934, (2021)