Broadband Acoustic Hyperbolic Metamaterial

In this Letter, we report on the design and experimental characterization of a broadband acoustic hyperbolic metamaterial. The proposed metamaterial consists of multiple arrays of clamped thin plates facing the y direction and is shown to yield opposite signs of effective density in the x and y directions below a certain cutoff frequency, therefore, yielding a hyperbolic dispersion. Partial focusing and subwavelength imaging are experimentally demonstrated at frequencies between 1.0 and 2.5 kHz. The proposed metamaterial could open up new possibilities for acoustic wave manipulation and may find usage in medical imaging and nondestructive testing.