Reconfigurable Acoustic Metagrating for High-Efficiency Anomalous Reflection

Metagratings are a recently proposed class of metasurfaces for efficient manipulation of an impinging wavefront within a subwavelength layer. They avoid the requirement for fine discretization of gradient metasurfaces, and overcome their inherent limitations in efficiency. Here, we demonstrate experimentally the functioning principle of a reconfigurable acoustic metagrating for anomalous reflection with high efficiency, using coarse geometric design features. It is formed by a periodic array of C-shaped meta-atoms, which exhibit large Willis coupling, resulting in a controlled level of asymmetry in their scattering pattern. Our results reveal that the proposed acoustic metagrating can reroute an incident wave towards a large angle, beyond the limitations of gradient-phase approaches with nearly unitary reflection efficiency. The proposed designs offer a highly efficient tunable platform to control steering angle and operating frequency. In our experiments, an acoustic wave is successfully steered to the desired reflection direction by finite metagratings, demonstrating reconfigurability in angle and operating frequency.