Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Bound States in the Continuum and Fano Resonances in Solid-Liquid Layered Media

Abstract

Bound states in continuum (BICs) are resonances with zero width (infinite lifetime) without any leakage into the surrounding media. Their fascinating properties and potential applications have attracted a great deal of interest. In this paper, we give an analytical, numerical, and experimental demonstration of BICs in simple acoustic structures based on either a single solid layer or a triple solid-liquid-solid layer inserted between two liquids. These modes are an intrinsic property of the inserted structure (solid layer or solid-liquid-solid triple layer) with free surfaces and are independent of the surrounding media. Two kinds of BICs are discussed: (i) Fabry-Perot (FP) BICs exist as the consequence of the intersection of the local resonances induced by inserted structure intersect the transmission zeros induced by the solid layers. (ii) Symmetry-protected (SP) BICs occur when appear at normal incidence due to the decoupling of the transverse modes in the solid layer from the longitudinal modes that propagate in the solid and solid-liquid multilayer media. When the incidence angle departs slightly from the BIC conditions, the latter transform into Fano resonances characterized by an asymmetric line shape in the transmission spectra. In addition, we show that the transmission zeros give rise to negative delay times and therefore acoustic superluminal effect. The theoretical results are obtained by means of the Green's function method, whereas the experimental measurements are carried out in ultrasonic domain using plexiglass plates in water. These results may have important applications to realize subsonic and acoustic superluminal phenomena as well as acoustic filters and sensors.