Harnessing Surface Instabilities for Functional Materials: Mechanics, Morphology, and Emerging Applications

Surface instabilities like wrinkling are recast as a versatile design paradigm for creating functional morphologies in soft materials, moving beyond their traditional view as mechanical failures. Precise control over hierarchical and spatially organized instability patterns enables tailored properties for advanced applications in electronics, optics, and biomedicine. Key emerging applications include highly sensitive E-skins, stretchable batteries and light-emitting diodes, physically unclonable anti-counterfeiting features, and surfaces with dynamically tunable wettability.