Beam aperture modifier design with acoustic metasurfaces

In this paper, we present a design concept of acoustic beam aperture modifier using two metasurface-based planar lenses. By appropriately designing the phase gradient profile along the metasurface, we obtain a class of acoustic convex lenses and concave lenses, which can focus the incoming plane waves and collimate the converging waves, respectively. On the basis of the high converging and diverging capability of these lenses, two kinds of lens combination scheme, including the convex-concave type and convex-convex type, are proposed to tune up the incoming beam aperture as needed. To be specific, the aperture of the acoustic beam can be shrunk or expanded through adjusting the phase gradient of the pair of lenses and the spacing between them. These lenses and the corresponding aperture modifiers are constructed by the stacking ultrathin labyrinthine structures, which are obtained by the geometry optimization procedure and exhibit high transmission coefficient and a full range of phase shift. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed beam aperture modifiers. Due to the flexibility in aperture controlling and the simplicity in fabrication, the proposed modifiers have promising potential in applications, such as acoustic imaging, nondestructive evaluation, and communication.