All origami artists should have in their repertoire certain basic folds—the petal, the crimp, the rabbit ear, to name just a few. Skillfully deployed, those basic folds can serve as building blocks for intricate, original creations. Now Randall Kamien, Shu Yang, and coworkers at the University of Pennsylvania have used concepts from condensed-matter theory to identify fundamental elements in a related art form: kirigami, the art of cutting, folding, and pasting.1
The Penn group specifically considered kirigami on a honeycomb lattice—a choice inspired by the prospect of fashioning three-dimensional nanostructures from self-assembled DNA networks and from graphene and graphene-like materials. The researchers impose constraints designed to mimic the bond networks in those materials: Cuts that remove part of a lattice are allowed, for instance, but only if subsequent folding and bond reformation around the excised area can restore the lattice’s connectivity without altering the bond lengths.
Panel a in...
