An acoustic invisible medium: A first-principles study

Abstract

We design and build an acoustic invisible medium (AIM) based on first principles. Isotropic, inhomogeneous mass density and bulk modulus profiles of the AIM are derived from scattering-free conditions. Acoustic invisibility is illustrated by two types of examples: the AIM under plane-wave incidence and point sound sources. It is found that an AIM of arbitrary shape is invisible to plane waves of any incident angle. The invisibility of the AIM holds for any sound source sitting anywhere except for in the AIM region. Acoustic field distributions show that the acoustic wave enters the AIM from one side and recovers its initial shape at the other side. The designed AIMs are numerically verified by the finite element method, and are highly consistent with theoretical results. This work offers an alternative strategy to achieve a scattering-free AIM and could be extendable to the three-dimensional cases.