Abstract
Bubbles in liquid and soft matter are excellent acoustic resonators with extremely low resonant frequencies. We find that bubbly soft matter (BSM) can enable full-phase (2π) modulation of incident acoustic waves just through changing the bubble size. Compared with the conventional solid–solid binary locally resonant metamaterial (SSM), due to the extreme bulk-modulus ratio of the bubbles and the soft matrix, the BSM has two distinguished merits. First, the size of the bubbly inclusions for the full-phase modulation is only about a third of the solid inclusions in the SSM; second, the range of variation of the bubbly inclusions to cover the full-phase modulation is two orders of magnitude wider than that of the solid inclusions. These features, combined with the salient advantage of wave-impedance match between soft matter and water, can realize compact and light-weight reflective and transmissive underwater bubble metasurfaces. At the lower limit 3 kHz of the active sonar operating frequency, an ultrathin reflective metasurface with a thickness of 1/50 the wavelength can redirect the incident waves at a given angle. Bubble resonance in soft matter opens a new avenue for underwater acoustic modulation at the deepest subwavelength.
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