Perfect transmission invisibility for waveguides with sound hard walls

TL;DR

This paper investigates conditions under which perfect acoustic wave transmission occurs in waveguides with sound hard walls, establishing fundamental limits and proposing methods to achieve undetectable defects.

Contribution

It proves that perfect transmission without phase shift is impossible below a certain wavenumber and introduces a domain perturbation method to realize perfect transmission at specific frequencies.

Findings

Perfect transmission is impossible below a certain wavenumber.

Smooth small perturbations cannot achieve perfect transmission.

Singular domain perturbations can produce undetectable defects.

Abstract

We are interested in a time harmonic acoustic problem in a waveguide with locally perturbed sound hard walls. We consider a setting where an observer generates incident plane waves at $-\infty$ and probes the resulting scattered field at $-\infty$ and $+\infty$. Practically, this is equivalent to measure the reflection and transmission coefficients respectively denoted $R$ and $T$. In [9], a technique has been proposed to construct waveguides with smooth walls such that $R=0$ and $|T|=1$ (non reflection). However the approach fails to ensure $T=1$ (perfect transmission without phase shift). In this work, first we establish a result explaining this observation. More precisely, we prove that for wavenumbers smaller than a given bound $k_{\star}$ depending on the geometry, we cannot have $T=1$ so that the observer can detect the presence of the defect if he/she is able to measure the phase at $+\infty$. In particular, if the perturbation is smooth and small (in amplitude and in width), $k_{\star}$ is very close to the threshold wavenumber. Then, in a second step, we change the point of view and, for a given wavenumber, working with singular perturbations of the domain, we show how to obtain $T=1$. In this case, the scattered field is exponentially decaying both at $-\infty$ and $+\infty$. We implement numerically the method to provide examples of such undetectable defects.