Tunable acoustic vortex generation by a compact rotating disk

Abstract

Acoustic vortices (AVs) carry orbital angular momentum (OAM), showing great promise in advancing communication, biomedicine, and metrology. An ideal OAM generation method that realizes the tunability of AV topological charge and working frequency in a compact way is strongly desired. Here, we utilize aerodynamic dipole sources from a rotating disk to generate AV. This method generates AVs with different topological charges through the interference of these dipole sources at the angular rotation frequency and its multiples. These AVs exhibit high purity, and their three-dimensional characteristics are explored. Furthermore, our experiment demonstrates that the generated AVs significantly enhance the sound field amplitude at their working frequency, which is the product of the topological charge and angular frequency. The results also verify that this amplitude enhancement effect is positively correlated with the AV’s stability and achieves the contactless detection of disk rotation information. The demonstrated method provides expanded versatility for OAM-based applications.