Perfect anomalous splitter by acoustic meta-grating

Abstract

As an inversely designed artificial device, metasurface usually means densely arranged meta-atoms with complex substructures. In acoustics, those meta-atoms are usually constructed by multi-folded channels or multi-connected cavities of deep sub-wavelength feature, which limits their implementation in pragmatic applications. We propose here a comprehensive concept of a perfect anomalous splitter based on an acoustic meta-grating. The beam splitter is designed by etching only two or four straight-walled grooves per period on a planar hard surface. Different from the recently reported reflectors or splitters, our device can perfectly split an incident wave into different desired directions with arbitrary power flow partition. In addition, because ultrathin substructures with thin walls and narrow channels are avoided in our design procedure, the proposed beam splitter can be used for waves with much shorter wavelength compared to the previous suggested systems. The design is established by rigorous formulae developed under the framework of the grating theory and a genetic optimization algorithm. Numerical simulation and experimental evidence are provided to discuss the involved physical mechanism and to give the proof-of-concept for the proposed perfect anomalous acoustic splitter.