Experimental study on acoustic subwavelength imaging based on zero-mass metamaterials

Anisotropic zero-mass acoustic metamaterials are able to transmit evanescent waves without decaying to a far distance, and have been used for near-field acoustic subwavelength imaging. In this work, we design and fabricate such metamaterial lens based on clamped paper membrane units. The zero-mass frequency is determined by normal-incidence acoustic transmission measurement. At this frequency, we verify in experiment that the fabricated metamaterial lens is able to distinguish clearly two sound sources separated with a distance 0.16λ0 (λ0 is the wavelength in air) below the diffraction limit. We also demonstrate that the imaging frequency is invariant to the change of the lens thickness.