Manipulation of transmitted wave front using ultrathin planar acoustic metasurfaces

Nowadays, the acoustic devices are developing toward miniaturization. However, conventional materials can hardly satisfy the requirements because of their large size and complex manufacturing process. The introduction of acoustic metasurfaces has broken these restrictions, as they are able to manipulate sound waves at will by utilizing ultrathin planar metamaterials. Here, a simple acoustic metasurface is designed and characterized, whose microstructure is constructed with a cavity filled with air and two elastic membranes on the ends of cavity. By appropriately optimizing the configurations of microstructures, the steering of transmitted wave trajectory is demonstrated, and some extraordinary phenomena are realized at 3.5 kHz, such as planar acoustic axicon, acoustic lens, the conversion from spherical waves to plane waves, and the transformation from propagating waves to surface waves.