Realizing spatiotemporal effective media for acoustic metamaterials

Abstract: The effective medium representation is fundamental in providing a performance-to-design approach for many devices based on metamaterials. While there are recent works in extending the effective medium concept into the temporal domain, a direct implementation is still missing. Here, we construct an acoustic metamaterial dynamically switching between two different configurations with a time-varying convolution kernel, which can now incorporate both frequency dispersion of metamaterials and temporal modulation. We establish the effective medium formula in temporally averaging the compressibilities, densities and even Willis coupling parameters of the two configurations. A phase disorder between the modulation of different atoms is found negligible on the effective medium. Our realization enables a high-level description of metamaterials in the spatiotemporal domain, making many recent proposals, such as magnet-free non-reciprocity, broadband slow-light and Fresnel drag using spatiotemporal metamaterials possible for implementations in future.