Abstract
The ability to control wave propagation is of fundamental interest in many areas of physics. Photonic crystals proved very useful for this purpose but, because they are based on Bragg interferences, these artificial media require structures with large dimensions. Metamaterials, on the other hand, can exhibit very deep subwavelength spatial scales. In general they are studied for their bulk effective properties that lead to effects such as negative refraction. Here we go beyond this effective medium paradigm and we use a microscopic approach to study metamaterials based on resonant unit cells. We show that we can tailor unit cells locally to shape the flow of waves at deep subwavelength scales. We validate our approach in experiments with both electromagnetic and acoustic waves in the metre range demonstrating cavities, waveguides, corners and splitters with centimetre-scale dimensions, an order of magnitude smaller than previous proposals.
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Acknowledgements
F.L. acknowledges financial support from the French ‘Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA)’.
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G.L. initiated and supervised the project. G.L. and F.L. conceived the theory and the experiments. G.L., F.L. and N.K. performed and analysed the experiments. All authors discussed the results and wrote the manuscript.
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Lemoult, F., Kaina, N., Fink, M. et al. Wave propagation control at the deep subwavelength scale in metamaterials. Nature Phys 9, 55–60 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2480
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2480
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