Experiments on Maxwell's fish-eye dynamics in elastic plates

Gautier Lefebvre (1) , Marc Dubois (1) , Romain Beauvais (1) , Younes Achaoui (2) , Ros-Kiri Ing (1) , Sébastien Guenneau (3) , Patrick Sebbah (4)

1 IL - Institut Langevin - Ondes et Images (UMR7587)
2 FRESNEL - Institut FRESNEL
3 EPSILON - EPSILON
4 ESPCI Paris - Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris

We experimentally demonstrate that a Duraluminium thin plate with a thickness profile varying radially in a piecewise constant fashion as , with h(0) = 0.5 mm, h(Rmax) = 2 mm, and Rmax = 10 cm, behaves in many ways as Maxwell's fish-eye lens in optics. Its imaging properties for a Gaussian pulse with central frequencies 30 kHz and 60 kHz are very similar to those predicted by ray trajectories (great circles) on a virtual sphere (rays emanating from the North pole meet at the South pole). However, the refocusing time depends on the carrier frequency as a direct consequence of the dispersive nature of flexural waves in thin plates. Importantly, experimental results are in good agreement with finite-difference-time-domain simulations.

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]

Gautier Lefebvre, Marc Dubois, Romain Beauvais, Younes Achaoui, Ros-Kiri Ing, et al.. Experiments on Maxwell's fish-eye dynamics in elastic plates . Applied Physics Letters, 2015, 106, pp.024101. ⟨10.1063/1.4905730⟩. ⟨hal-01283606⟩