Ultrabroadband Elastic Cloaking in Thin Plates

Control of waves with metamaterials is of great topical interest, and is fueled by rapid progress in broadband acoustic and electromagnetic cloaks. We propose a design for a cloak to control bending waves propagating in isotropic heterogeneous thin plates. This is achieved through homogenization of a multilayered concentric coating filled with piecewise constant isotropic elastic material. Significantly, our cloak displays no phase shift for both backward and forward scattering. To foster experimental efforts, we provide a simplified design of the cloak which is shown to work in a more than two-octave frequency range (30 Hz to 150 Hz) when it consists of 10 layers using only 6 different materials overall. This metamaterial should be easy to manufacture, with potential applications ranging from car industry to anti-earthquake passive systems for smart buildings, depending upon the plate dimensions and wavelengths.