A new class of tunable hypersonic phononic crystals based on polymer-tethered colloids.

The design and engineering of hybrid materials exhibiting tailored phononic band gaps are fundamentally relevant to innovative material technologies in areas ranging from acoustics to thermo-optic devices. Phononic hybridization gaps, originating from the anti-crossing between local resonant and propagating modes, have attracted particular interest because of their relative robustness to structural disorder and the associated benefit to 'manufacturability'. Although hybridization gap materials are well known, their economic fabrication and efficient control of the gap frequency have remained elusive because of the limited property variability and expensive fabrication methodologies. Here we report a new strategy to realize hybridization gap materials by harnessing the 'anisotropic elasticity' across the particle-polymer interface in densely polymer-tethered colloidal particles. Theoretical and Brillouin scattering analysis confirm both the robustness to disorder and the tunability of the resulting hybridization gap and provide guidelines for the economic synthesis of new materials with deliberately controlled gap position and width frequencies.

Experimental observation on a frequency spectrum of a plate mode of a predominantly leaky nature

The problem of normal propagation modes of a plate submerged in a fluid is usually treated by considering continuous leaky Lamb waves or by considering transient waves. Angular plate resonances are associated with modes obtained by the first approach, whereas frequency plate resonances are associated with modes obtained using the second method. The dispersion curves for these two kinds of mode are almost identical, except for certain modes at large phase speed. In an experiment one is never dealing with one of these extreme situations because the applied signal is never infinitely long and the beam used to insonify the plate is never infinitely wide. In this paper we report on the manifestation in the transmission frequency spectrum, of a plate mode of a predominantly leaky nature. The extra mode, which has never been reported on, is observed between the cutoff frequencies of the symmetrical transient modes S1 and S2 of a submerged aluminium plate. The modes are identified by means of an Argand diagram.