Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a technique for generating acoustic bottles in open air that can bend the paths of sound waves along prescribed convex trajectories. This animation shows the self-bending dynamics and obstacle-circumventing capabilities of the acoustic bottle field compared to a Gaussian beam. Sound energy can be seen flowing through the curved shell of the bottle. (Credit: Xiang Zhang group)
After being emitted from a planar-phased source, sound energy forms a 3D acoustic bottle of high-pressure walls and a null region in the middle. Pressure field at bottom shows self-bending ability of the bottle beam to circumvent 3D obstacles. Dashed arrows indicate wave front direction. (Credit: Xiang Zhang group)
Acoustic intensity distribution of self-bending bottle beam shows the predesigned trajectory (red-dashed curve) and the propagation direction of the beam (gray-dashed curve). The scale bar = 0.1 meter. (Credit: Xiang Zhang group)