Yangbo Xie

Wavefront modulation and subwavelength diffractive acoustics with an acoustic metasurface

Metasurfaces are a family of novel wavefront-shaping devices with planar profile and subwavelength thickness. Acoustic metasurfaces with ultralow profile yet extraordinary wave manipulating properties would be highly desirable for improving the performance of many acoustic wave-based applications. However, designing acoustic metasurfaces with similar functionality to their electromagnetic counterparts remains challenging with traditional metamaterial design approaches. Here we present a design and realization of an acoustic metasurface based on tapered labyrinthine metamaterials. The demonstrated metasurface can not only steer an acoustic beam as expected from the generalized Snells law, but also exhibits various unique properties such as conversion from propagating wave to surface mode, extraordinary beam-steering and apparent negative refraction through higher-order diffraction. Such designer acoustic metasurfaces provide a new design methodology for acoustic signal modulation devices and may be useful for applications such as acoustic imaging, beam steering, ultrasound lens design and acoustic surface wave-based applications.

Measurement of a broadband negative index with space-coiling acoustic metamaterials

We report the experimental demonstration of a broadband negative refractive index obtained in a labyrinthine acoustic metamaterial structure. Two different approaches were employed to prove the metamaterial negative index nature: one-dimensional extractions of effective parameters from reflection and transmission measurements and two-dimensional prism-based measurements that convincingly show the transmission angle corresponding to negative refraction. The transmission angles observed in the latter case also agree very well with the refractive index obtained in the one-dimensional measurements and numerical simulations. We expect this labyrinthine metamaterial to become the unit cell of choice for practical acoustic metamaterial devices that require broadband and significantly negative indices of refraction.

Tapered labyrinthine acoustic metamaterials for broadband impedance matching

We present five kinds of labyrinthine or space-coiling acoustic metamaterials with tapered channels and apertures. These designs exhibit negative index behavior with modest dispersion, and also have substantially improved impedance matching compared to previously investigated labyrinthine cells. Experimentally measured effective material parameters are in good agreement with numerically computed results for the first two designs. Numerical results are presented for the other three unit cells. By virtue of their design tunability and small size, these tapered labyrinthine acoustic metamaterials show potential as building blocks for a wide range of acoustic wave manipulation and imaging applications.

Broadband Acoustic Hyperbolic Metamaterial.

In this Letter, we report on the design and experimental characterization of a broadband acoustic hyperbolic metamaterial. The proposed metamaterial consists of multiple arrays of clamped thin plates facing the y direction and is shown to yield opposite signs of effective density in the x and y directions below a certain cutoff frequency, therefore, yielding a hyperbolic dispersion. Partial focusing and subwavelength imaging are experimentally demonstrated at frequencies between 1.0 and 2.5 kHz. The proposed metamaterial could open up new possibilities for acoustic wave manipulation and may find usage in medical imaging and nondestructive testing.

Design and demonstration of broadband thin planar diffractive acoustic lenses

We present here two diffractive acoustic lenses with subwavelength thickness, planar profile, and broad operation bandwidth. Tapered labyrinthine unit cells with their inherently broadband effective material properties are exploited in our design. Both the measured and the simulated results are showcased to demonstrate the lensing effect over more than 40% of the central frequency. The focusing of a propagating Gaussian modulated sinusoidal pulse is also demonstrated. This work paves the way for designing diffractive acoustic lenses and more generalized phase engineering diffractive elements with labyrinthine acoustic metamaterials.

Tunable Asymmetric Transmission via Lossy Acoustic Metasurfaces

In this study, we show that robust and tunable acoustic asymmetric transmission can be achieved through gradient-index metasurfaces by harnessing judiciously tailored losses. We theoretically prove that the asymmetric wave behavior stems from loss-induced suppression of high order diffraction. We further experimentally demonstrate this novel phenomenon. Our findings could provide new routes to broaden applications for lossy acoustic metamaterials and metasurfaces.

Asymmetric acoustic transmission through near-zero-index and gradient-index metasurfaces

We present a design of acoustic metasurfaces yielding asymmetric transmission within a certain frequency band. The design consists of a layer of gradient-index metasurface and a layer of low refractive index metasurface. Incident waves are controlled in a wave vector dependent manner to create strong asymmetric transmission. Numerical simulations show that the approach provides high transmission contrast between the two incident directions within the designed frequency band. This is further verified by experiments. Compared to previous designs, the proposed approach yields a compact and planar device. Our design may find applications in various scenarios such as noise control and therapeutic ultrasound.

Single-sensor multispeaker listening with acoustic metamaterials

Significance Combining acoustic metamaterials and compressive sensing, we demonstrate here a single-sensor multispeaker listening system that functionally mimics the selective listening and sound separation capabilities of human auditory systems. Different from previous research efforts that generally rely on signal and speech processing techniques to solve the “cocktail party” listening problem, our proposed method is a unique hardware-based approach by exploiting carefully designed acoustic metamaterials. We not only believe that the results of this work are significant for communities of various disciplines that have been pursuing the understanding and engineering of cocktail party listening over the past decades, but also that the system design approach of combining physical layer design and computational sensing will impact on traditional acoustic sensing and imaging modalities. Designing a “cocktail party listener” that functionally mimics the selective perception of a human auditory system has been pursued over the past decades. By exploiting acoustic metamaterials and compressive sensing, we present here a single-sensor listening device that separates simultaneous overlapping sounds from different sources. The device with a compact array of resonant metamaterials is demonstrated to distinguish three overlapping and independent sources with 96.67% correct audio recognition. Segregation of the audio signals is achieved using physical layer encoding without relying on source characteristics. This hardware approach to multichannel source separation can be applied to robust speech recognition and hearing aids and may be extended to other acoustic imaging and sensing applications.

Acoustic Holographic Rendering with Two-dimensional Metamaterial-based Passive Phased Array

Acoustic holographic rendering in complete analogy with optical holography are useful for various applications, ranging from multi-focal lensing, multiplexed sensing and synthesizing three-dimensional complex sound fields. Conventional approaches rely on a large number of active transducers and phase shifting circuits. In this paper we show that by using passive metamaterials as subwavelength pixels, holographic rendering can be achieved without cumbersome circuitry and with only a single transducer, thus significantly reducing system complexity. Such metamaterial-based holograms can serve as versatile platforms for various advanced acoustic wave manipulation and signal modulation, leading to new possibilities in acoustic sensing, energy deposition and medical diagnostic imaging.

A low‐frequency near‐field interferometric‐TOA 3‐D Lightning Mapping Array

We report on the development of an easily deployable LF near-field interferometric-time of arrival (TOA) 3-D Lightning Mapping Array applied to imaging of entire lightning flashes. An interferometric cross-correlation technique is applied in our system to compute windowed two-sensor time differences with submicrosecond time resolution before TOA is used for source location. Compared to previously reported LF lightning location systems, our system captures many more LF sources. This is due mainly to the improved mapping of continuous lightning processes by using this type of hybrid interferometry/TOA processing method. We show with five station measurements that the array detects and maps different lightning processes, such as stepped and dart leaders, during both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground flashes. Lightning images mapped by our LF system are remarkably similar to those created by VHF mapping systems, which may suggest some special links between LF and VHF emission during lightning processes.