We introduce a multi-coiled acoustic metasurface providing a quasi-perfect absorption (reaching 99.99% in experiments) at extremely low-frequency of 50 Hz, and simultaneously featuring an ultrathin thickness down to λ/527 (1.3 cm). In contrast to the state of the art, this original conceived multi-coiled metasurface offers additional degrees of freedom capable to tune the acoustic impedance effectively without increasing the total thickness. We provide analytical derivation, numerical simulation and experimental demonstrations for this unique absorber concept, and discuss its physical mechanism which breaks the quarter-wavelength resonator theory. Furthermore, based on the same conceptual approach, we propose a broadband lowfrequency metasurface absorber by coupling unit cells exhibiting different properties.
We design a two-dimensional ultra-thin elastic metasurface consisting of steel cores coated with elliptical rubbers embedded in epoxy matrix, capable of manipulating bulk elastic wave modes for reflected waves. The energy exchanges between the longitudinal and transverse modes are completely controlled by the inclined angle of rubber. One elastic mode can totally convert into another by the ultra-thin elastic metasurface. The conversion mechanism based on the non-degenerate dipolar resonance is a general method and easily extended to three-dimensional or mechanical systems. A mass-spring model…
We report the polarization-dependent electromagnetic response from a series of novel terahertz (THz) metasurfaces where asymmetry is introduced through the displacement of two adjacent metallic arms separated by a distance $δ$. For all polarization states, the symmetric metasurface exhibits a low quality (Q) factor fundamental dipole mode. By breaking the symmetry, we experimentally observe a secondary dipole-like mode with a Q factor nearly $9\times$ higher than the fundamental resonance. As $δ$ increases, the fundamental dipole mode $f_{1}$ redshifts and the secondary mode $f_{2}$ blueshifts…
Metasurfaces have emerged as a promising technology for the manipulation of electromagnetic waves within a thin layer. In planar ultrathin metasurfaces, there exist rigorous narrowband design methods, based on the equivalent surface impedance of patterned metallic layers on dielectric substrates. In this work, we derive a limit on bandwidth achievable in these metasurfaces, based on constraints that their meta-atoms should be passive, causal and lossless, and that they should obey the time-bandwidth product rules of a single resonance structure. The results show that in addition to elementary …
Symmetry-protected resonances can be made to couple with free space by introducing a small degree of geometric asymmetry, leading to controllably-sharp spectral response. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a broken-symmetry metasurface for the technologically important low millimeter wave spectrum. The proposed metasurface is fabricated on an ultrathin polyimide substrate, resulting in a low loss and flexible structure. Measurements inside an anechoic chamber experimentally verify the theoretically predicted sharp spectral features corresponding to quality factors of several hundreds. The dem…
Invisibility or unhearability cloaks have been made possible by using metamaterials making light or sound flow around obstacle without the trace of reflections or shadows. Metamaterials are known for being flexible building units that can mimic a host of unusual and extreme material responses, which are essential when engineering artificial material properties to realize a coordinate transforming cloak. Bending and stretching the coordinate grid in space requires stringent material parameters, therefore, small inaccuracies and inevitable material losses become sources for unwanted scattering t…
Metasurface with gradient phase response offers new alternative for steering the propagation of waves. Conventional Snell's law has been revised by taking the contribution of local phase gradient into account. However, the requirement of momentum matching along the metasurface sets its nontrivial beam manipulation functionality within a limited-angle incidence. In this work, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that the acoustic gradient metasurface supports the negative reflection for all-angle incidence. The mode expansion theory is developed to help understand how the gradient me…
Retroreflectors that can accurately redirect the incident wave in free space back along its original channel provide unprecedented opportunities for light manipulation in wireless communication. However, to the best of our knowledge, the existing methods of designing retroreflectors suffer from either the bulky size, narrow angular bandwidth, or time-consuming post-processing. Here, a scheme of designing ultrathin and all-angle retroreflectors based on hyperbolic plasmonic metasurfaces is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The physical mechanism underlying this scheme is the high-effici…
Metamaterials and metasurfaces operating in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) offer a promising route towards next-generation photodetectors and devices for solar energy harvesting. While numerous metamaterials and metasurfaces using metals and semiconductors have been demonstrated, semimetals-based metasurfaces in the vis-NIR range are notably missing. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a broadband metasurface superabsorber based on large area, semimetallic, van der Waals PtSe2 thin films in agreement with electromagnetic simulations. Our results show that PtSe2 is an ultrathin and scalabl…
A tunable metasurface absorber is presented in this work using an optically-programmable capacitor as the tuning element. The tuning element does not employ conventional semiconductor technologies to operate but rather a bases its tuning by changing the optomechanical properties of its dielectric, poly disperse red 1 acrylate (PDR1A). Doing so there are no conventional semiconductor devices in the RF signal path. The metasurface operates at a design frequency of 5.5 GHz and it achieves an optically-tuned bandwidth of 150 MHz, from 5.50 GHz to 5.65 GHz.
We report the experimental demonstration of tunable asymmetric acoustic metasurfaces with extreme contrast, made by two decorated membrane resonators (DMRs) coupled via a sealed air column. The front side of the metasurface is impedance matched to air and perfectly absorbing, while the backside is hard and totally reflecting. When a suitable DC voltage is applied to the backside DMR with proper electrodes, the surface impedance of the back side of the metasurfaces can be tuned from one extreme to the other, such that the backside becomes impedance matched to air and totally absorbing, while th…
The incorporation of materials with controllable electromagnetic constitutive parameters allows the conceptualization and realization of controllable metasurfaces. With the aim of formulating and investigating a tricontrollable metasurface for efficiently absorbing terahertz radiation, we adopted a pixel-based approach in which the meta-atoms are biperiodic assemblies of discrete pixels. We patched some pixels with indium antimonide (InSb) and some with graphene, leaving the others unpatched. The bottom of each meta-atom was taken to comprise a metal-backed substrate of silicon nitride. The In…
Metasurfaces, ultrathin and planar electromagnetic devices with sub-wavelength unit cells, have recently attracted enormous attention for their powerful control over electromagnetic waves, from microwave to visible range. With tunability added to the unit cells, the programmable metasurfaces enable us to benefit from multiple unique functionalities controlled by external stimuli. In this review paper, we will discuss the recent progress in the field of programmable metasurfaces and elaborate on different approaches to realize them, with the tunability from global aspects, to local aspects, and…
The unusual viscoelastic properties of silica aerogel plates are efficiently used to design subwavelength perfect sound absorbers. We theoretically, numerically and experimentally report a perfect absorbing metamaterial panel made of periodically arranged resonant building blocks consisting of a slit loaded by a clamped aerogel plate backed by a closed cavity. The impedance matching condition is analyzed using the Argand diagram of the reflection coefficient, i.e., the trajectory of the reflection coefficient as a function of frequency in the complex plane. The lack or excess of losses in the …
A broadband sound absorption attained by a deep-subwavelength structure is of great interest to the noise control community especially for extremely low frequencies (20-100 Hz) in room acoustics. Coupling multiple different resonant unit cells has been an effective strategy to achieve a broadband sound absorption. In this paper, we report on an analytical, numerical and experimental study of a low-frequency broadband (50-63 Hz, one third octave band), high absorption (average absorption coefficient around 93%), near-omnidirectional (0°-75°) acoustic metasurface absorber composed of 4 coupled u…
Ultrathin planar absorbing layers, including semiconductor and metal films, and 2D materials, are promising building blocks for solar energy harvesting devices but poor light absorption has been a critical issue. Although interference in ultrathin absorbing layers has been studied to realize near perfect absorption at a specific wavelength, achieving high broadband absorption still remains challenging. Here, we both theoretically and experimentally demonstrated a method to tune not only reflection phase shift but also electromagnetic energy dissipation to design broadband solar absorber with s…
We present an asymmetric bifacial graphene metasurface to realize tunable and broadband coherent perfect absorption (CPA) at terahertz (THz) frequencies. The proposed design is composed of two dissimilar graphene square patch metasurfaces stacked over an ultrathin dielectric substrate. Nonlinear CPA performance without resorting to optical nonlinearities and amplification are demonstrated based on wave interference phenomena taking place along and inside this subwavelength structure. Broadband asymmetric reflection from opposite directions is obtained in the case of single wave illumination. T…
We propose a novel class of ultrathin high Q passband filters designed by properly combining different multipolar resonances sustained by an all dielectric metasurface. A rigorous analytical model, based on surface impedance homogenization and accounting for the effects of both dipolar and the quadrupolar contributions to the overall scattering response, is derived and verified through numerical simulations. Then, it is described how it is possible to engineer the interactions between dipoles and quadrupoles in a metasurface made by core shell spherical elements to design ultrathin and broadba…
The ability to control waves at the nanoscale has attracted considerable attention to ultrathin metasurface lenses (metalenses) in optical imaging and encryption systems. We propose an approach to active tuning metasurfaces by integrating an ultrathin layer of indium-tin-oxide (ITO) into a unit cell as an electro-optically tunable material. A proposed design features two orthogonal wings that can independently manipulate waves with corresponding orthogonal polarizations. The charge carrier concentration in the ITO accumulation layer is altered by modulating the applied bias voltage. This bias …
We propose to achieve joint detections of frequency and direction of arrival in wideband using single sensor based on an active metasurface with programmable transmission states of pass and stop. By integrating two PIN diodes with the opposite directions into the proposed single-layer and ultrathin meta-atom, the transmission performance with 10 dB difference between the pass and stop states is realized in the bandwidth from 5.9 GHz to 8.8 GHz using field-circuit co-simulations. Accordingly, random receiving patterns are generated by controlling the programmable metasurface composed of the swi…
Metasurfaces, the ultrathin media with extraordinary wavefront modulation ability, have shown versatile potential in manipulating waves. However, existing acoustic metasurfaces are limited by their narrow-band frequency-dependent capability, which severely hinders their real-world applications that usually require customized dispersion. To address this bottlenecking challenge, we report ultra-broadband achromatic metasurfaces that are capable of delivering arbitrary and frequency-independent wave properties by bottom-up topology optimization. We successively demonstrate three ultra-broadband f…
Metasurfaces are ultrathin structures which are constituted by an array of subwavelength scatterers with designable scattering responses. They have opened up unprecedented exciting opportunities for extraordinary wave engineering processes. On the other hand, frequency converters have drawn wide attention due to their vital applications in telecommunication systems, health care devices, radio astronomy, military radars and biological sensing systems. Here, we show that a spurious-free and linear frequency converter metasurface can be realized by leveraging unique properties of engineered trans…
Efficiently receiving underwater sound remotely from air is a long-standing challenge in acoustics hindered by the large impedance mismatch at the water-air interface. Here we introduce and experimentally demonstrate a technique for remote and efficient water-to-air eavesdropping through phase-engineered impedance matching metasurfaces. By judiciously engineering an ultrathin mechanically-rigid boundary, we make the water-air interface acoustically transparent and at the same time we are able to pattern the transmitted wavefront, enabling efficient control over the effective spatial location o…
Sub-10 nm continuous metal films are promising candidates for flexible and transparent nanophotonics and optoelectronics applications. In this Letter, we demonstrate that monolayer MoS2 is a perspective adhesion layer for the deposition of continuous conductive gold films with a thickness of only 3-4 nm. Optical properties of continuous ultrathin gold films deposited on two-dimensional MoS2 grown by chemical vapor deposition are investigated by spectroscopic ellipsometry over a wide wavelength range (300-3300 nm). Results show that optical losses in ultrathin films increase with decreasing thi…
We numerically demonstrate a new type of waveform-selective metasurface that senses the difference in incoming waveforms or pulse widths at the same frequency. Importantly, the proposed structure contains precise rectifier circuits that, compared to ordinary schottky diodes used within old types of structures, rectify induced electric charges at a markedly reduced input power level depending on several design parameters but mostly on the gain of operational amplifiers. As a result, a waveform-selective absorbing mechanism related to this turn-on voltage appears even with a limited signal stren…
Deep-Subwavelength and Broadband Quarter-Wave Retardation in Ultrathin Hyperbolic MoOCl2
XPANCEO；University of Rome Tor Vergata（罗马托尔维加塔大学）；University of Chemistry and Technology Prague（布拉格化工大学）；National Graphene Institute (NGI), University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学石墨烯国家研究所）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
