Tailoring dispersion and evanescent modes in multimodal nonlocal lattices using positive-only interactions

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible interpolation-based method to tailor dispersion relations in nonlocal lattices, enabling precise control over wave phenomena like rotons and evanescent modes while maintaining physical constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interpolation framework for customizing dispersion in nonlocal lattices, ensuring positive stiffness and passive behavior, applicable to complex coupling mechanisms.

Findings

Enables creation of rotons and control of group velocity dispersion.

Allows design of evanescent waves with specific decay characteristics.

Ensures physical realism with positive, passive stiffness parameters.

Abstract

Metamaterials derive their unconventional properties from engineered microstructures, with periodic lattices providing a versatile framework for modeling wave propagation. Dispersion relations, obtained from Bloch-Floquet theory, govern how waves propagate, attenuate, or localize within such systems. Extending interactions beyond nearest neighbors, through nonlocality, substantially enriches the design space of band diagrams, enabling phenomena such as negative or zero group velocities, roton-like extrema, and band-gap localization. However, existing approaches to dispersion tailoring often rely on analytical formulations or Fourier-based identifications, which become impractical for complex coupling mechanisms and offer limited control over physical constraints such as stiffness positivity. This work introduces a general interpolation-based framework for customizing dispersion relations in uniform nonlocal lattices. Rather than reconstructing full dispersion curves, the method enforces prescribed frequency-wavenumber points as interpolation constraints, enabling localized and tunable control of wave behavior. The formulation is applied to both spring- and beam-interaction lattices, and demonstrated on an Euler-Bernoulli beam model with adjustable nonlocal couplings. Through systematic parameter tuning, the framework enables the creation of rotons, the adjustment of group-velocity dispersion, and the design of evanescent waves with controlled exponential decay within band gaps, all while ensuring real, positive-only stiffness parameters and passive mechanical behavior. Altogether, this parametric interpolation strategy provides a physically consistent and computationally efficient route for engineering advanced phononic functionalities in periodic nonlocal systems.