Broadband and broad-angle asymmetric acoustic transmission by unbalanced excitation of surface evanescent waves based on single-layer metasurface

Abstract

Currently, complicated structure, incident-angle selectivity, and narrow frequency band are the key drawbacks of the asymmetric acoustic transmission (AAT) devices. Here we tackle these problems by proposing a class of single-layer lossy acoustic metasurfaces. The broadband AAT performance is realized in a broad range of incident angles. When the incident angle is in the range between two critical values, which are derived in this paper, an external sound wave can be converted into an evanescent mode, and the total internal reflection occurs for backward sound. The incident sound wave can be negatively refracted for forward sound if the evanescent mode conversion condition is broken, representing the realization of the AAT. However, the AAT phenomenon cannot be observed outside of the range defined above. The proposed design of highly efficient broad-angle AAT can find applications in sound sensing and noise control.