Superlensing effect of an anisotropic metamaterial slab with near-zero dynamic mass

A metamaterial slab of anisotropic mass with one diagonal component being infinity and the other being zero is demonstrated to behave as a superlens for acoustic imaging beyond the diffraction limit. The underlying mechanism for extraordinary transmission of evanescent waves is attributed to the zero mass effect. Microstructure design for such anisotropic lens is also presented. In contrast to the anisotropic superlens based on Fabry-P\'erot resonant mechanism, the proposed lens operates without the limitation on lens thickness, thus more flexible in practical applications. Numerical modeling is performed to validate the proposed ideas.Comment: 4 figure

Topological mechanics in quasicrystals

We study topological mechanics in two-dimensional quasicrystalline parallelogram tilings. Topological mechanics has been studied intensively in periodic lattices in the past a few years, leading to the discovery of topologically protected boundary floppy modes in Maxwell lattices. In this paper we extend this concept to quasicrystalline parallelogram tillings and we use the Penrose tiling as our example to demonstrate how these topological boundary floppy modes arise with a small geometric perturbation to the tiling. The same construction can also be applied to disordered parallelogram tilings to generate topological boundary floppy modes. We prove the existence of these topological boundary floppy modes using a duality theorem which relates floppy modes and states of self stress in parallelogram tilings and fiber networks, which are Maxwell reciprocal diagrams to one another. We find that, due to the unusual rotational symmetry of quasicrystals, the resulting topological polarization can exhibit orientations not allowed in periodic lattices. Our result reveals new physics about the interplay between topological states and quasicrystalline order, and leads to novel designs of quasicrystalline topological mechanical metamaterials.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure