Emerging from electromagnetic waves and fast extending to acoustic and elastic waves, metamaterials that exhibit extraordinary wave control abilities have been gaining soaring attention. Over the past two decades, elastic metamaterials with engineered microstructures have provided a variety of appealing solutions for controlling elastic waves and vibrations. By tailoring their internal microstructures at a subwavelength scale, elastic metamaterials fruitfully distinct themselves from traditional materials or phononic crystals by their striking functions in wave trajectory manipulation, cloaking, nonreciprocal and topological wave control, as well as low-frequency wave/vibration mitigation and absorption.
Yet metamaterials composed of passive materials alone limit their performance, functionality, and tunability. One of the greatest challenges in the development of elastic metamaterials is how to change their properties without physical modifications of microstructures, and the solutions to this challenge are critical for broadening and controlling the metamaterial capabilities in real-time. With active elements incorporated into metamaterial designs, tunable and/or programmable devices with functionalities controlled by external stimuli become possible, opening new platforms to dynamically manipulate elastic waves. On the other hand, non-Hermitian physics and parity–time (PT) symmetry systems, which exhibit unique properties and unexpected features, have recently attracted enormous interests. Programmable metamaterials with additional degree of freedom to precisely control the gain and loss could embrace wavefront shaping devices and promise unconventional applications. Additionally, recent advances in additive manufacturing techniques, which allow fabricating customized polymer, metal, ceramic, and composite structures, have not only accelerated metamaterial development process, but also empowered metamaterial fabrication at much smaller scales. As such, designing and fabricating programmable metamaterials with additive manufacturing techniques could allow numerous metamaterial devices for real applications.
The aim of this Research Topic is to provide the state-of-the-art studies on programmable metamaterials and their device applications. Topics addressed in this Research Topic include, but are not limited to:
• Active metamaterials and metadevices
• Non-Hermitian physics
• Parity–time (PT) symmetry
• Smart metamaterials
• Multifunctional metamaterials
• Piezoelectric metamaterials
• Chiral metamaterials
• Metamaterials for energy harvesting
• Metamaterials for vibration suppression/attenuation
• Metamaterials with enhanced sensing
Emerging from electromagnetic waves and fast extending to acoustic and elastic waves, metamaterials that exhibit extraordinary wave control abilities have been gaining soaring attention. Over the past two decades, elastic metamaterials with engineered microstructures have provided a variety of appealing solutions for controlling elastic waves and vibrations. By tailoring their internal microstructures at a subwavelength scale, elastic metamaterials fruitfully distinct themselves from traditional materials or phononic crystals by their striking functions in wave trajectory manipulation, cloaking, nonreciprocal and topological wave control, as well as low-frequency wave/vibration mitigation and absorption.
Yet metamaterials composed of passive materials alone limit their performance, functionality, and tunability. One of the greatest challenges in the development of elastic metamaterials is how to change their properties without physical modifications of microstructures, and the solutions to this challenge are critical for broadening and controlling the metamaterial capabilities in real-time. With active elements incorporated into metamaterial designs, tunable and/or programmable devices with functionalities controlled by external stimuli become possible, opening new platforms to dynamically manipulate elastic waves. On the other hand, non-Hermitian physics and parity–time (PT) symmetry systems, which exhibit unique properties and unexpected features, have recently attracted enormous interests. Programmable metamaterials with additional degree of freedom to precisely control the gain and loss could embrace wavefront shaping devices and promise unconventional applications. Additionally, recent advances in additive manufacturing techniques, which allow fabricating customized polymer, metal, ceramic, and composite structures, have not only accelerated metamaterial development process, but also empowered metamaterial fabrication at much smaller scales. As such, designing and fabricating programmable metamaterials with additive manufacturing techniques could allow numerous metamaterial devices for real applications.
The aim of this Research Topic is to provide the state-of-the-art studies on programmable metamaterials and their device applications. Topics addressed in this Research Topic include, but are not limited to:
• Active metamaterials and metadevices
• Non-Hermitian physics
• Parity–time (PT) symmetry
• Smart metamaterials
• Multifunctional metamaterials
• Piezoelectric metamaterials
• Chiral metamaterials
• Metamaterials for energy harvesting
• Metamaterials for vibration suppression/attenuation
• Metamaterials with enhanced sensing
