An ultra-thin ventilated metasurface with extreme asymmetric absorption

Abstract

Recent progress in minimizing sound absorbers is driven by their great scientific significance and engineering value; however, compact devices for low-frequency sound are still challenging. Here, we construct an ultra-thin metasurface by parallel connecting resonators with high dissipation loss to a non-resonant reactance-dominated boundary (RDB) with high radiation loss, which realizes extreme absorption asymmetry at the exceptional point of scattering eigenvalue. We develop a parallel transfer matrix method to design the system, and a deep-subwavelength absorber (the operating wavelength is 120 times of its thickness) with 99.2% and 0.5% absorption for sound incident from opposite ports is achieved. The extreme absorption asymmetry is ascribed to the distinct coupling between the RDB and resonant meta-atom in an unbalanced dissipating state with excellent robustness against geometrical reconfigurations originated from the broadband near-unity reflection characteristics of the RDB. In particular, the proposed strategy brings the design of a degree of freedom rather than typical multiple resonant modes, and an extensible prototype showing >90% (<1%) absorptance for left- (right-) incidence within a wavelength from 23.3 to 18 times its thickness is demonstrated.