Negative refraction induced acoustic concentrator and the effects of scattering cancellation, imaging, and mirage

Abstract

We present a three-dimensional acoustic concentrator capable of significantly enhancing the sound intensity in the compressive region with scattering cancellation, imaging, and mirage effects. The concentrator shell is built by isotropic gradient negative-index materials, which together with an exterior host medium slab constructs a pair of complementary media. The enhancement factor, which can approach infinity by tuning the geometric parameters, is always much higher than that of a traditional concentrator made by positive-index materials with the same size. The acoustic scattering theory is applied to derive the pressure field distribution of the concentrator, which is consistent with the numerical full-wave simulations. The inherent acoustic impedance match at the interfaces of the shell as well as the inverse processes of ``negative refraction---progressive curvature---negative refraction'' for arbitrary sound rays can exactly cancel the scattering of the concentrator. In addition, the concentrator shell can also function as an acoustic spherical magnifying superlens, which produces a perfect image with the same shape, with bigger geometric and acoustic parameters located at a shifted position. Then some acoustic mirages are observed whereby the waves radiated from (scattered by) an object located in the center region may seem to be radiated from (scattered by) its image. Based on the mirage effect, we further propose an intriguing acoustic transformer which can transform the sound scattering pattern of one object into another object at will with arbitrary geometric, acoustic, and location parameters.