Dynamics of Phononic Materials and Structures: Historical Origins, Recent Progress, and Future Outlook

The form of energy termed heat that typically derives from lattice vibrations, i.e., phonons, is usually considered as waste energy and, moreover, deleterious to information processing. However, in this Colloquium, an attempt is made to rebut this common view: By use of tailored models it is demonstrated that phonons can be manipulated similarly to electrons and photons, thus enabling controlled heat transport. Moreover, it is explained that phonons can be put to beneficial use to carry and process information. In the first part ways are presented to control heat transport and to process information for physical systems which are driven by a temperature bias. In particular, a toolkit of familiar electronic analogs for use of phononics is put forward, i.e., phononic devices are described which act as thermal diodes, thermal transistors, thermal logic gates, and thermal memories. These concepts are then put to work to transport, control, and rectify heat in physically realistic nanosystems by devising practical designs of hybrid nanostructures that permit the operation of functional phononic devices; the first experimental realizations are also reported. Next, richer possibilities to manipulate heat flow by use of time-varying thermal bath temperatures or various other external fields are discussed. These give rise to many intriguing phononic nonequilibrium phenomena such as, for example, the directed shuttling of heat, geometrical phase-induced heat pumping, or the phonon Hall effect, which may all find their way into operation with electronic analogs.

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Colloquium : Phononics: Manipulating heat flow with electronic analogs and beyond

We show here the existence of acoustic metamaterial, in which both the effective density and bulk modulus are simultaneously negative, in the true and strict sense of an effective medium. Our double-negative acoustic system is an acoustic analogue of Veselago's medium in electromagnetism, and shares many unique consequences, such as negative refractive index. The double negativity in acoustics is derived from low-frequency resonances, as in the case of electromagnetism, but the negative density and modulus are derived from a single resonance structure as distinct from electromagnetism in which the negative permeability and negative permittivity originates from different resonance mechanisms.

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Double-negative acoustic metamaterial.

A three-dimensional periodic structure focuses acoustic waves to a spot size that is one fiftieth of the wavelength—beating the classical diffraction limit by a long way. The device could lead to improved resolution for ultrasound imaging.

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A holey-structured metamaterial for acoustic deep-subwavelength imaging

Research efforts addressing spin waves (magnons) in micro- and nanostructured ferromagnetic materials have increased tremendously in recent years. Corresponding experimental and theoretical work in magnonics faces significant challenges in that spin-wave dispersion relations are highly anisotropic and different magnetic states might be realized via, for example, the magnetic field history. At the same time, these features offer novel opportunities for wave control in solids going beyond photonics and plasmonics. In this topical review we address materials with a periodic modulation of magnetic parameters that give rise to artificially tailored band structures and allow unprecedented control of spin waves. In particular, we discuss recent achievements and perspectives of reconfigurable magnonic devices for which band structures can be reprogrammed during operation. Such characteristics might be useful for multifunctional microwave and logic devices operating over a broad frequency regime on either the macro- or nanoscale.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-8984/26/12/123202/pdf

Review and prospects of magnonic crystals and devices with reprogrammable band structure

Negative refraction of acoustic waves in two-dimensional phononic crystals has been demonstrated through both analysis and exact numerical simulation. The methods to achieve this behavior have been discussed. A microsuperlens for acoustic waves has also been designed. It is shown that refractive devices based on phononic crystals behave in a manner similar to that of optical systems. Therefore, a negative square root of the effective density or negative refraction index for acoustic waves can be introduced to describe this phenomena very well as the case of electromagnetic waves in the photonic crystals.

Zhengyou Liu

Papers

Negative refraction of acoustic waves in two-dimensional phononic crystals