Metamaterial bricks and quantal meta-surfaces: Towards spatial sound modulators

The ability to control acoustic fields is crucial in diverse applications such as loudspeaker design, ultrasound imaging and therapy, or acoustic particle manipulation. The current approaches use fixed lenses or expensive and bulky phased arrays. Here, using a process of analogue-to-digital conversion and wavelet decomposition, we develop the notion of quantal meta-surfaces. The quanta here are small, pre-manufactured 3D units - which we call metamaterial bricks - each encoding a specific phase delay. These bricks can be assembled into meta-surfaces to generate any diffraction-limited acoustic field. We then apply this methodology to show examples of acoustic focusing and steering and, after stacking single meta-surfaces into layers, the more complex bottle-shaped field required to form an acoustic tractor beam. Here, we demonstrate experimentally single-sided air-borne acoustic levitation using meta-layers at various bit-rates: from a 4-bit uniform to 3-bit non-uniform quantization in phase. This powerful methodology dramatically simplifies the design of acoustic devices and provides a key-step towards the realisation of spatial sound modulators.