Absorption characteristics of large acoustic metasurfaces

Metasurfaces formed of arrays of subwavelength resonators are often tuned to ‘critically couple’ with incident radiation, so that at resonance dissipative and radiative damping are balanced and absorption is maximized. Such design criteria are typically derived assuming an infinite metasurface, whereas the absorption characteristics of finite metasurfaces, even very large ones, can be markedly different in certain frequency intervals. This is due to the excitation of surface waves, intrinsic to resonant metasurfaces and especially meta-resonances, namely collective resonances where the surface waves form standing-wave patterns over the planar metasurface domain. We illustrate this issue using a detailed model of a Helmholtz-type acoustic metasurface formed of cavity-neck pairs embedded into a rigid substrate, with geometric and dissipation effects included from first principles (R. Brandão and O. Schnitzer, Wave Motion, 97, 102583, 2020). This article is part of the theme issue ‘Wave generation and transmission in multi-scale complex media and structured metamaterials (part 1)’.