Role of nanophotonics in the birth of seismic megastructures

TL;DR

This paper explores how nanophotonics-inspired concepts like seismic metamaterials can revolutionize the control of seismic waves and influence the design of future megastructures, drawing parallels with ancient architectural marvels.

Contribution

It introduces the application of nanophotonics tools to seismic metamaterials and proposes their use in designing seismic control structures and megastructures, bridging physics, civil engineering, and history.

Findings

Seismic metamaterials can control surface and bulk seismic waves.

Coordinate transform and Floquet-Bloch theories are applicable to geophysics.

Ancient megastructures resemble modern seismic cloaks.

Abstract

The discovery of photonic crystals thirty years ago, in conjunction with research advances in plasmonics and metamaterials, has inspired the concept of decameter scale metasurfaces, coined seismic metamaterials, for an enhanced control of surface (Love and Rayleigh) and bulk (shear and pressure) elastodynamic waves. The powerful mathematical tools of coordinate transforms, effective medium and Floquet-Bloch theories, which have revolutionized nanophotonics, can be translated in the language of civil engineering and geophysics. Experiments on seismic metamaterials made of buried elements in the soil demonstrate that the fore mentioned tools make possible a novel description of complex phenomena of soil-structure interaction during a seismic disturbance. But the concepts are already moving to more futuristic concepts and the same notions developed for structured soils are now used to examine the effects of buildings viewed as above surface resonators in megastructures such as metacities. But this perspective of the future should not make us forget the heritage of the ancient peoples. Indeed, we finally point out the striking similarity between an invisibility cloak design and the architecture of some ancient megastructures as antique Gallo-Roman theaters and amphitheatres.