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Acoustic metasurfaces are two-dimensional materials that impart non-trivial amplitude and phase shifts on incident acoustic waves at a predetermined frequency. While acoustic metasurfaces enable extraordinary wavefront engineering capabilities, they are not developed well enough to independently control the amplitude and phase of reflected and transmitted acoustic waves simultaneously, which are governed by their geometry. We aim to solve the inverse design problem of finding a geometry to achieve a specified set of acoustic properties. The geometry is modeled by discretizing the continuous space into a finite number of elements, where each element can either be filled with air or solid material. Full wave simulations are performed to obtain the acoustic properties for a given geometry. It is computationally infeasible to simulate all geometries. To address this challenge, we develop an experimental design-based algorithm to efficiently perform the simulations. The algorithm starts with a few geometries and adaptively adds geometries to the set, such that they fill the entire space of the desired acoustic properties using a small fraction of the possible geometries. We find that the geometry needs to have at least 7 × 7 elements to obtain any given acoustic property with a tolerance of 5.4% of its maximum range. This is achieved by simulating 24 000 geometries using the proposed algorithm, which is only [Formula: see text] of the 563 × 10 12 possible geometries. The method provides a general solution to the inverse design problem that can be extended to control more acoustic properties. 

Bluetooth requires device pairing to ensure security in data transmission, encumbering a number of ad-hoc, transactional interactions that require both ease-of-use and "good enough" security: e.g., sharing contact information or secure links to people nearby. We introduce Bit Whisperer, an ad-hoc short-range wireless communication system that enables "walk up and share'" data transmissions with "good enough" security. Bit Whisperer transmits data to proximate devices co-located on a solid surface through high frequency, inaudible acoustic signals. The physical surface has two benefits: it limits communication range since sound travels more robustly on a flat solid surface than air; and, it makes the domain of communication visible, helping users identify exactly with whom they are sharing data without prior pairing. Through a series of technical evaluations, we demonstrate that Bit Whisperer is robust for common use-cases and secure against likely threats. We also implement three example applications to demonstrate the utility of Whisperer: 1-to-1 local contact sharing, 1-to-N private link sharing to open a secure group chat, and 1-to-N local device authentication. 

Active acoustic metamaterials incorporate electric circuit elements that input energy into an otherwise passive medium to aptly modulate the effective material properties. Here, we propose an active acoustic metamaterial with Willis coupling to drastically extend the tunability of the effective density and bulk modulus with the accessible parameter range enlarged by at least two orders of magnitude compared to that of a non-Willis metamaterial. Traditional active metamaterial designs are based on local resonances without considering the Willis coupling that limit their accessible effective material parameter range. Our design adopts a unit cell structure with two sensor-transducer pairs coupling the acoustic response on both sides of the metamaterial by detecting incident waves and driving active signals asymmetrically superimposed onto the passive response of the material. The Willis coupling results from feedback control circuits with unequal gains. These asymmetric feedback control circuits use Willis coupling to expand the accessible range of the effective density and bulk modulus of the metamaterial. The extreme effective material parameters realizable by the metamaterials will remarkably broaden their applications in biomedical imaging, noise control, and transformation acoustics-based cloaking.