Active Coding Piezoelectric Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces active coding piezoelectric metasurfaces capable of versatile acoustic wave manipulation, offering a frequency-independent, simple, and compact solution that combines advantages of metasurfaces and phased arrays for diverse applications.

Contribution

The work presents a novel active coding piezoelectric metasurface design that enables controllable acoustic wave functionalities with a single electrode, overcoming bandwidth and complexity limitations of existing methods.

Findings

Demonstrated beam steering, focusing, and vortex beam generation.

Achieved ultrasound imaging using the metasurface.

Enabled frequency-independent control via polarization coding.

Abstract

The manipulation of acoustic waves plays an important role in a wide range of applications. Currently, acoustic wave manipulation typically relies on either acoustic metasurfaces or phased array transducers. The elements of metasurfaces are designed and optimized for a target frequency, which thus limits their bandwidth. Phased array transducers, suffering from high-cost and complex control circuits, are usually limited by the array size and the filling ratio of the control units. In this work, we introduce active coding piezoelectric metasurfaces; demonstrate commonly implemented acoustic wave manipulation functionalities such as beam steering, beam focusing and vortex beam focusing, acoustic tweezers; and eventually realize ultrasound imaging. The information coded on the piezoelectric metasurfaces herein is frequency independent and originates from the polarization directions, pointing either up or down, of the piezoelectric materials. Such a piezoelectric metasurface is driven by a single electrode and acts as a controllable active sound source, which combines the advantages of acoustic metasurfaces and phased array transducers while keeping the devices structurally simple and compact. Our coding piezoelectric metasurfaces can lead to potential technological innovations in underwater acoustic wave modulation, acoustic tweezers, biomedical imaging, industrial non-destructive testing and neural regulation.