Sound can levitate objects of different sizes and materials through air, water and tissue. This allows us to manipulate cells, liquids, compounds or living things without touching or contaminating them. However, acoustic levitation has required the targets to be enclosed with acoustic elements or had limited manoeuvrability. Here we optimize the phases used to drive an ultrasonic phased array and show that acoustic levitation can be employed to translate, rotate and manipulate particles using even a single-sided emitter. Furthermore, we introduce the holographic acoustic elements framework that permits the rapid generation of traps and provides a bridge between optical and acoustical trapping. Acoustic structures shaped as tweezers, twisters or bottles emerge as the optimum mechanisms for tractor beams or containerless transportation. Single-beam levitation could manipulate particles inside our body for applications in targeted drug delivery or acoustically controlled micro-machines that do not interfere with magnetic resonance imaging.

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Structural health monitoring (SHM) using guided waves is one of the only ways in which damage anywhere in a structure can be detected using a sparse array of permanently attached sensors. To distinguish damage from structural features, some form of comparison with damage-free reference data is essential, and here subtraction is considered. The detectability of damage is determined by the amplitude of residual signals from structural features remaining after the subtraction of reference data. These are non-zero due to changing environmental conditions such as temperature. In this paper, the amplitude of the residual signals is quantified for different guided-wave SHM strategies. Comparisons are made between two methods of reference signal subtraction and between two candidate sensor configurations. These studies allow estimates to be made of the number of sensors required per unit area to reliably detect a prescribed type of damage. It is shown that the number required is prohibitively high, even in the presence of modest temperature fluctuations, hence some form of temperature compensation is absolutely essential for guided-wave SHM systems to be viable. A potential solution is examined and shown to provide an improvement in signal suppression of approximately 30 dB, which corresponds to two orders of magnitude reduction in the number of sensors required.

SignificanceHolographic optical tweezers use focused light to manipulate multiple objects independently without contact. They are used in tasks such as measuring the spring constant of DNA, the pulling force of the kinesin protein, or to trap matter in exotic states. Differently, acoustic tweezers use sound radiation forces to trap particles at a larger scale (i.e., from micrometers to centimeters). However, previous implementations did not provide individual control. We present the realization of holographic acoustic tweezers. Using an array of sound emitters, we engineer the generated sound field to manipulate multiple particles individually. This enables applications in contactless assembly both at the micrometer and centimeter scale as well as the creation of displays in which the pixels are levitating particles.