Morpho: A programmable environment for shape optimization and shape-shifting

Soft materials underpin many domains of science and engineering,including soft robotics, structured fluids, and biological and particulatemedia. In response to applied mechanical, electromagnetic or chemicalstimuli, such materials typically change shape, often dramatically.Predicting their structure is of great interest to facilitate design andmechanistic understanding, and can be cast as an optimization problemwhere a given energy function describing the physics of the material isminimized with respect to the shape of the domain and additional fields.However, shape-optimization problems are very challenging to solve, andthere is a lack of suitable simulation tools that are both readily accessibleand general in purpose. Here we present an open-source programmableenvironment, Morpho, and demonstrate its versatility by showcasing arange of applications from different areas of soft-matter physics: swellinghydrogels, complex fluids that form aspherical droplets, soap films andmembranes, and filaments.