Muralidhar Ambati

Acoustic metamaterials can be described by effective material properties such as mass density and modulus. We have developed a method to extract these effective properties from reflection and transmission coefficients, which can be measured experimentally. The dependency of effective properties on the positions of the boundaries of the acoustic metamaterial is discussed, and a proper procedure to determine the boundaries is presented. This retrieval method is used to analyze various acoustic metamaterials, and metamaterials with negative effective properties are reported.

We report that the negative material responses of acoustic metamaterials can lead to a plethora of surface resonant states. We determine that negative effective-mass density is the necessary condition for the existence of surface states on acoustic metamaterials. We offer the microscopic picture of these unique surface states; in addition, we find that these surface excitations enhance the transmission of evanescent pressure fields across the metamaterial. The evanescent pressure fields scattered from an object can be resonantly coupled and enhanced at the surface of the acoustic metamaterial, resulting in an image with resolution below the diffraction limit. This concept of acoustic superlens opens exciting opportunities to design acoustic metamaterials for ultrasonic imaging.

We report a direct experimental evidence of stimulated emission of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) at telecom wavelengths (1532 nm) with erbium doped glass as a gain medium. We observe an increase in the propagation length of signal surface plasmons when erbium ions are excited optically using pump SPP. The design, fabrication, and characterization of SPP waveguides, thin gold metal strips, embedded in erbium (Er) doped phosphate glass is presented. Such systems can be suitable as integrated devices coupling electronic and photonic data transmissions as well as SPP amplifiers and SPP lasers.