Ultrathin Acoustic Metasurface Holograms with Arbitrary Phase Control

Programmable Acoustic Holography using Medium-Sound-Speed Modulation

Acoustic holography offers the ability to generate designed acoustic fields to manipulate microscale objects. However, the static nature or large aperture sizes of 3D printed acoustic holographic phase plates limits the ability to rapidly alter generated fields. In this work， a programmable acoustic holography approach is demonstrated by which multiple discrete or continuously variable acoustic targets can be created. Here, the holographic phase plate encodes multiple images, where the desired field is produced by modifying the sound speed of an intervening fluid media. Its flexibility is demonstrated in generating various acoustic patterns, including continuous line segments, discrete letters and numbers, using this method as a sound speed indicator and fluid identification tool. This programmable acoustic holography approach has the advantages of generating reconfigurable and designed acoustic fields, with broad potential in microfluidics, cell/tissue engineering, real-time sensing, and medical ultrasound.

Theoretical Zero-Thickness Broadband Holograms Based on Acoustic Sieve Metasurfaces

Acoustic holography is an essential tool for controlling sound waves, generating highly complex and customizable sound fields, and enabling the visualization of sound fields. Based on acoustic sieve metasurfaces (ASMs), this paper proposes a theoretical design approach for zero-thickness broadband holograms. The ASM is a zero-thickness rigid screen with a large number of small holes that allow sound waves to pass through and produce the desired real image in the target plane. The hole arrangement rules are determined using a genetic algorithm and the Rayleigh–Sommerfeld theory. Because the wave from a hole has no extra phase or amplitude modulation, the intractable modulation dispersion can be physically avoided, allowing the proposed ASM-based hologram to potentially function in any frequency band as long as the condition of paraxial approximation is satisfied. Using a numerical simulation based on the combination of the finite element method (FEM) and the boundary element method (BEM), this research achieves broadband holographic imaging with a good effect. The proposed theoretical zero-thickness broadband hologram may provide new possibilities for acoustic holography applications.