Acoustically invisible gateways

Abstract

In recent years considerable interest has been directed at devising obstacles which appear "invisible" to various types of wave propagation. That is; suppose for example we can construct an obstacle coated with an appropriate material such that when illuminated by an incident field (e.g plane wave) the wave scattered by the obstacle has zero cross section (equivalently radiation pattern)for all incident directions and frequencies then the obstacle appears to have no effect on the illuminating wave and the obstacle can be considered invisible. Such an electromagnetic cloaking device has been constructed by Schurig et. al [18]. Motivated by recent work [1] concerning the problem of a parallel flow of particles falling on a body with piecewise smooth boundary and leaving no trace the analogous problem of acoustic scattering of a plane wave illuminating the same body, a gateway, is considered. It is shown that at high frequencies, with use of the Kirchoff approximation and the geometrical theory of diffraction, the scattered far field in a range of observed directions, e. g the back scattered direction, is zero for a discrete set of wave numbers. That is the gateway is acoustically "invisible" in that direction.2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 74J20, 78A45; Secondary: 34L25.