Reconfigurable mechanism-based metamaterials for ternary-coded elastic wave polarizers and programmable refraction control

Elastic metamaterials with unusual elastic properties offer unprecedented ways to modulate the polarization and propagation of elastic waves. However, most of them rely on the resonant structural components, and thus are frequency-dependent and unchangeable. Here, we present a reconfigurable 2D mechanism-based metamaterial which possesses transformable and frequency-independent elastic properties. Based on the proposed mechanism-based metamaterial, interesting functionalities, such as ternary-coded elastic wave polarizer and programmable refraction, are demonstrated. Particularly, unique ternary-coded polarizers, with 1-trit polarization filtering and 2-trit polarization separating of longitudinal and transverse waves, are first achieved. Then, the strong anisotropy of the proposed metamaterial is harnessed to realize positive-negative bi-refraction, only-positive refraction, and only-negative refraction. Finally, the wave functions with detailed microstructures are numerically verified.