Tailored acoustic metamaterials. Part I. Thin- and thick-walled Helmholtz resonator arrays.

We present a novel multipole formulation for computing the band structures of two-dimensional arrays of cylindrical Helmholtz resonators. This formulation is derived by combining existing multipole methods for arrays of ideal cylinders with the method of matched asymptotic expansions. We construct asymptotically close representations for the dispersion equations of the first band surface, correcting and extending an established lowest-order (isotropic) result in the literature for thin-walled resonator arrays. The descriptions we obtain for the first band are accurate over a relatively broad frequency and Bloch vector range and not simply in the long-wavelength and low-frequency regime, as is the case in many classical treatments. Crucially, we are able to capture features of the first band, such as low-frequency anisotropy, over a broad range of filling fractions, wall thicknesses and aperture angles. In addition to describing the first band we use our formulation to compute the first band gap for both thin- and thick-walled resonators, and find that thicker resonator walls correspond to both a narrowing of the first band gap and an increase in the central band gap frequency.

Tailored acoustic metamaterials. Part II. Extremely thick-walled Helmholtz resonator arrays.

We present a solution method which combines the technique of matched asymptotic expansions with the method of multipole expansions to determine the band structure of cylindrical Helmholtz resonator arrays in two dimensions. The resonator geometry is considered in the limit as the wall thickness becomes very large compared with the aperture width (the extremely thick-walled limit). In this regime, the existing treatment in Part I (Smith & Abrahams, 2022 Tailored acoustic metamaterials. Part I. Thin- and thick-walled Helmholtz resonator arrays), with updated parameters, is found to return spurious spectral behaviour. We derive a regularized system which overcomes this issue and also derive compact asymptotic descriptions for the low-frequency dispersion equation in this setting. We find that the matched-asymptotic system is able to recover the first few bands over the entire Brillouin zone with ease, when suitably truncated. A homogenization treatment is outlined for describing the effective bulk modulus and effective density tensor of the resonator array for all wall thicknesses. We demonstrate that extremely thick-walled resonators are able to achieve exceptionally low Helmholtz resonant frequencies, and present closed-form expressions for determining these explicitly. We anticipate that the analytical expressions and the formulation outlined here may prove useful in designing metamaterials for industrial and other applications.

Violating the Energy-Momentum Proportionality of Photonic Crystals in the Low-Frequency Limit.

We theoretically show that the frequency and momentum of a photon are not necessarily proportional to one another at low frequencies in photonic crystals comprising materials with positive- and negative-valued material properties. We rigorously determine closed-form conditions for the light cone to emanate from points other than the origin of k space, ultimately decoupling the first band from the origin and demonstrating light propagation at zero energy with nonzero crystal momentum. We also numerically show that first bands can originate from an arbitrary Bloch coordinate as well as from multiple coordinates simultaneously.

Reflection from a multi-species material and its transmitted effective wavenumber.

We formally deduce closed-form expressions for the transmitted effective wavenumber of a material comprising multiple types of inclusions or particles (multi-species), dispersed in a uniform background medium. The expressions, derived here for the first time, are valid for moderate volume fractions and without restriction on the frequency. We show that the multi-species effective wavenumber is not a straightforward extension of expressions for a single species. Comparisons are drawn with state-of-the-art models in acoustics by presenting numerical results for a concrete and a water-oil emulsion in two dimensions. The limit of when one species is much smaller than the other is also discussed and we determine the background medium felt by the larger species in this limit. Surprisingly, we show that the answer is not the intuitive result predicted by self-consistent multiple scattering theories. The derivation presented here applies to the scalar wave equation with cylindrical or spherical inclusions, with any distribution of sizes, densities and wave speeds. The reflection coefficient associated with a halfspace of multi-species cylindrical inclusions is also formally derived.