Bottling Up Sound Waves

Acoustic Bottle Beams from Berkeley Lab Hold Promise for Imaging, Cloaking, Levitation and Other Apps

There’s a new wave of sound on the horizon carrying with it a broad scope of tantalizing potential applications, including advanced ultrasonic imaging and therapy, and acoustic cloaking, levitation and particle manipulation. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a technique for generating acoustic bottles in open air that can bend the paths of sound waves along prescribed convex trajectories.

Sound waves move much like light waves. They travel on a straight path but this path – through reflection, diffraction or refraction – can be bent. This is the basis for ultrasound medical imaging and non-destructive testing of materials. An intense search has been underway in recent years to develop techniques that can bend the paths of sound waves along a curved trajectory so as to meet the more stringent demands of super high-resolution imaging, acoustic cloaking and other exotic applications. Artificial nanoconstructs known as “metamaterials” have been engineered that can bend sound waves sufficiently but the nature of these materials places limits on their applications, especially for biological purposes.

“We need to find ways to bend acoustic wave fields without depending on the use of a highly engineered medium,” says Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. “With our bottle beam technique, we can design and synthesize acoustic bottles that are capable of directing sound waves along paths of desired curvature through homogeneous space without the need of metamaterials or any other highly engineered medium.”

Zhang, who also holds the Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chair Professor at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, directs the National Science Foundation’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, and is a member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (ENSI) at Berkeley. He and his group have gained international acclaim for research involving the manipulation of light and sound that has yielded some extraordinary results – an invisibility cloaking device, a plasmonic Airy beam that curves light, the world’s first acoustic hyperlens, a four-dimensional crystal that will keep perfect time forever, and much more.

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