# Bandgap widening by disorder in rainbow metamaterials

## TL;DR

This study experimentally demonstrates that disorder and reconfigurability in rainbow metamaterials can significantly widen subwavelength bandgaps, enhancing their filtering capabilities.

## Contribution

It introduces a tunable heterogeneous plate with reconfigurable pillars, showing how disorder influences and broadens bandgap properties.

## Key findings

- Disorder widens the bandgap spectrum.
- Reconfigurable pillars enable tunability.
- Random arrangements produce wider attenuation ranges.

## Abstract

Stubbed plates, i.e., thin elastic sheets endowed with pillar-like resonators, display subwavelength, locally-resonant bandgaps that are primarily controlled by the intrinsic resonance properties of the pillars. In this work, we experimentally study the bandgap response of a tunable heterogeneous plate endowed with reconfigurable families of pillars. We demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, both the spectrum of resonant frequencies of the pillars and their spatial arrangement influence the filtering characteristics of the system. Specifically, both spatially graded and disordered arrangements result in bandgap widening. Moreover, the spectral range over which attenuation is achieved with random arrangements is on average wider than the one observed with graded configurations.