Anomalous Refraction of Acoustic Guided Waves in Solids with Geometrically Tapered Metasurfaces

The concept of a metasurface opens new exciting directions to engineer the refraction properties in both optical and acoustic media. Metasurfaces are typically designed by assembling arrays of subwavelength anisotropic scatterers able to mold incoming wave fronts in rather unconventional ways. The concept of a metasurface was pioneered in photonics and later extended to acoustics while its application to the propagation of elastic waves in solids is still relatively unexplored. We investigate the design of acoustic metasurfaces to control elastic guided waves in thin-walled structural elements. These engineered discontinuities enable the anomalous refraction of guided wave modes according to the generalized Snell's law. The metasurfaces are made out of locally resonant toruslike tapers enabling an accurate phase shift of the incoming wave, which ultimately affects the refraction properties. We show that anomalous refraction can be achieved on transmitted antisymmetric modes (A(0)) either when using a symmetric (S-0) or antisymmetric (A(0)) incident wave, the former clearly involving mode conversion. The same metasurface design also allows achieving structure embedded planar focal lenses and phase masks for nonparaxial propagation.