Cubic metamaterial crystal supporting broadband isotropic chiral phonons
Chiral metamaterials can support chiral phonons leading to acoustical activity, the acoustical counterpart of optical activity. However, the properties of early metamaterial designs have been very highly anisotropic, and chiral acoustical phonons occurred only for selected high-symmetry directions. The authors propose a novel chiral metamaterial based on ``twisting'' a truncated octahedron in a simple-cubic unit cell. Not supported by crystal symmetry alone but rather by a tuned degeneracy, chiral phonons and large broadband acoustical activity are obtained for all phonon propagation directions in 3D. This result is notable because even isotropic achiral acoustical phonons are rare for crys…
Topologically Protected Twist Edge States for a Resonant Mechanical Laser-Beam Scanner
We design a one-dimensional chain of two different alternating three-dimensional elastic chiral unit cells. The chain’s topological band gap, a result of the alternation of unit cells combined with their chirality and an effective mirror symmetry, guarantees a protected edge state, corresponding to a localized twist mode with an eigenfrequency inside the one-dimensional band gap. A small axial modulation at the one end of the beam can excite this resonant twist mode at the other end of the beam, via evanescent modes in the gap. The topological robustness of the edge state allows us to add a micromirror to the other end of the beam, turning the arrangement into a resonant mechanical laser-be…
Mapping acoustical activity in 3D chiral mechanical metamaterials onto micropolar continuum elasticity
Abstract We compare the phonon band structures and chiral phonon eigenmodes of a recently experimentally realized three-dimensional (3D) cubic chiral metamaterial architecture to results from linear micropolar elasticity, an established generalization of classical linear Cauchy elasticity. We achieve very good qualitative agreement concerning the anisotropies of the eigenfrequencies, the anisotropies of the eigenmode properties of the acoustic branches, as well as with respect to the observed pronounced sample-size dependence of acoustical activity and of the static push-to-twist conversion effects. The size dependence of certain properties, that is, the loss of scale invariance, is a finge…
Static chiral Willis continuum mechanics for three-dimensional chiral mechanical metamaterials
International audience; Recent static experiments on twist effects in chiral three-dimensional mechanical metamaterials have been discussed in the context of micropolar Eringen continuum mechanics, which is a generalization of linear Cauchy elasticity. For cubic symmetry, Eringen elasticity comprises nine additional parameters with respect to linear Cauchy elasticity, of which three directly influence chiral effects. Here, we discuss the behavior of the static case of an alternative generalization of linear Cauchy elasticity, the Willis equations. We show that in the homogeneous static cubic case, only one additional parameter with respect to linear Cauchy elasticity results, which directly…
When size matters
That the unit cell of a metamaterial can't be considered vanishingly small like in ordinary crystals has long been deemed more burden than opportunity. The emergence of a characteristic length scale in metamaterial chains may change that trend.
New Twists of 3D Chiral Metamaterials
Rationally designed artificial materials, called metamaterials, allow for tailoring effective material properties beyond ("meta") the properties of their bulk ingredient materials. This statement is especially true for chiral metamaterials, as unlocking certain degrees of freedom necessarily requires broken centrosymmetry. While the field of chiral electromagnetic/optical metamaterials has become rather mature, the field of elastic/mechanical metamaterials is just emerging and wide open. This research news reviews recent theoretical and experimental progress concerning 3D chiral mechanical and optical metamaterials, with special emphasis on work performed at KIT.