Physical limits to sensing material properties*

Constitutive relations describe how materials respond to external stimuli such as forces. All materials respond heterogeneously at small scales, which limits what a localized sensor can discern about the global constitution of a material. In this talk, I will present the limits to the precision of such constitutional sensing for sensors embedded in disordered media. Our results reveal how one can construct microscopic devices capable of sensing near these physical limits, e.g. for medical diagnostics. I will show how our theoretical framework can be applied to an experimental system by estimating a bound on the precision of cellular mechanosensing in a biopolymer network.