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Abstract From quasicrystalline alloys to twisted bilayer graphene, the study of material properties arising from quasiperiodic structure has driven advances in theory and applied science. Here we introduce a class of two-phase composites, structured by deterministic Moiré patterns, and we find that these composites display exotic behavior in their bulk electrical, magnetic, diffusive, thermal, and optical properties. With a slight change in the twist angle, the microstructure goes from periodic to quasiperiodic, and the transport properties switch from those of ordered to randomly disordered materials. This transition is apparent when we distill the relationship between classical transport coefficients and microgeometry into the spectral properties of an operator analogous to the Hamiltonian in quantum physics. We observe this order to disorder transition in terms of band gaps, field localization, and mobility edges analogous to Anderson transitions — even though there are no wave scattering or interference effects at play here. 

The Neumann–Poincaré (NP) operator, a singular integral operator on the boundary of a domain, naturally appears when one solves a conductivity transmission problem via the boundary integral formulation. Recently, a series expression of the NP operator was developed in two dimensions based on geometric function theory [34]. In this paper, we investigate geometric properties of composite materials using this series expansion. In particular, we obtain explicit formulas for the polarisation tensor and the effective conductivity for an inclusion or a periodic array of inclusions of arbitrary shape with extremal conductivity, in terms of the associated exterior conformal mapping. Also, we observe by numerical computations that the spectrum of the NP operator has a monotonic behaviour with respect to the shape deformation of the inclusion. Additionally, we derive inequality relations of the coefficients of the Riemann mapping of an arbitrary Lipschitz domain using the properties of the polarisation tensor corresponding to the domain. 

In heterogeneous composite materials, the behaviour of the medium on larger scales is determined by the microgeometry and properties of the constituents on finer scales. To model the influence of the microlevel processes in composite materials, they are described as materials with memory in which the constitutive relations between stress and strain are given as time-domain convolutions with some relaxation kernel. The paper reveals the relationship between the viscoelastic relaxation kernel and the spectral measure in the Stieltjes integral representation of the effective properties of composites. This spectral measure contains all information about the microgeometry of the material, thus providing a link between the relaxation kernel and the microstructure of the composite. We show that the internal resonances of the microstructure determine the characteristic relaxation times of the fading memory kernel and can be used to introduce a set of internal variables that captures dissipation at the microscale. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Modelling of dynamic phenomena and localization in structured media (part 2)’. 

The paper deals with forward and inverse homogenization of Maxwell's equations with a geometry on a microscopic scale given by a quasiperiodic distribution of piece-wise constant components defined by the use of a mapping R : ℝ n → ℝ m , m > n, and a periodic unit cell in ℝ m . Inverse homogenization makes use of a Stieltjes analytic representation for the effective complex permittivity, which depends upon R, unlike for the periodic case.