Information in Matter Theme colloquium

Disordered and multistable materials subjected to cyclic driving exhibit reproducible, history-dependent responses — memory effects that encode information about their microscopic structure. While the memory behavior of isolated constituents is well characterized, the role of interactions between elements in massively metastable systems remains poorly understood. We observe that such interactions qualitatively transform the memory landscape of designer disordered media, generating memory effects across distinct driving protocols that cannot be captured by single-element descriptions. In this talk I will focus on several of these interaction-induced effects, and argue that memory in complex matter is not a property of constituents alone, but a result of interaction-driven self-organization.