Electromagnetic-acoustic splitter with a tunable splitting ratio based on copper plates

• Published in: Optics letters 2023-07, Vol.48 (13), p.3407-3410
• Main Authors: Chen, Zihao, Sun, Fei, Liu, Yichao, Ma, Xiaomin, Chen, Hanchuan, Chao, Kun, Chen, Zhihui, Wang, Jiangang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic waves; Acoustics; Beam splitters; Beams (radiation); Copper; Electromagnetic Phenomena; Energy consumption; Metal plates; Navigation; Sound; Splitting
• ISSN: 0146-9592; 1539-4794
• DOI: 10.1364/OL.492941

Acoustic splitters and electromagnetic splitters can be applied in various fields (e.g., navigation and interference detection). However, there is still a lack of study of structures that can simultaneously split acoustic and electromagnetic beams. In this study, a novel, to the best of our knowledge, electromagnetic-acoustic splitter (EAS) based on copper plates is proposed, which can simultaneously produce identical beam-splitting effects for transverse magnetic (TM)-polarized electromagnetic and acoustic waves. Different from previous beam splitters, the beam splitting ratio of the proposed passive EAS can be simply tuned by changing the incident angle of the input beam, i.e., a tunable splitting ratio can be achieved without additional energy consumption. The simulated results verify that the proposed EAS can create two transmitted split beams with a tunable splitting ratio for both electromagnetic and acoustic waves. This may have applications in dual-field navigation/detection, which can provide additional information and higher accuracy compared with single-field navigation/detection.