Realizing directional acoustic signal transmittance and reception robust against surrounding noise and competing signals is crucial in many areas such as communication, navigation, and detection for medical and industrial purposes. The fundamentally wide-angled radiation pattern of most current acoustic sensors and transducers displays a major limitation of the performance when it comes to precise targeting and probing of sound particular of interest in human speaking and hearing. Here, it is shown how topological acoustic valley transport can be designed to enable a unique beamforming mechanism that renders a superdirective needle-like sound radiation and reception pattern. The strategy rests on out-coupling valley-polarized edge states, whose beam is experimentally detected in the far-field with 10° width and a sound-intensity enhancement factor ≈10. Furthermore, anti-interference communication is proposed where sound is received from desired directions, but background noise from other directions is successfully suppressed. This type of topological acoustic antenna offers new ways to control sound with improved performance and functionalities that are highly desirable for versatile applications.

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Acoustic holography has extensive possibilities in acoustic sensing, acoustic illusion, contactless particle manipulation, and medical imaging. Based on coating unit cells and perforated panels, an acoustic composite metasurface is constructed with a decoupled modulation of phase and amplitude, which has been used to design acoustic holography. This proposal not only has lower complexity than conventional acoustic holography of active arrays due to the avoidance of complex structures and circuits but also provides more flexibility than acoustic holography based on the acoustic metasurface with phase-only modulation benefitting from the efficient decoupled modulation of phase and amplitude. We have further demonstrated three acoustic holographic applications, such as multi-directional transmission, multi-focal focusing, and holographic imaging. Due to the low complexity and the great flexibility, this proposal has potential to achieve the high-quality holograms with high information content, fine resolution, and large scale.