Focusing and Mode Separation of Elastic Vector Solitons in a 2D Soft Mechanical Metamaterial

Soft mechanical metamaterials can support a rich set of dynamic responses, which, to date, have received relatively little attention. Here, we report experimental, numerical, and analytical results describing the behavior of an anisotropic two-dimensional flexible mechanical metamaterial when subjected to impact loading. We not only observe the propagation of elastic vector solitons with three components---two translational and one rotational---that are coupled together, but also very rich direction-dependent behaviors such as the formation of sound bullets and the separation of pulses into different solitary modes.