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Updated: Jul 15, 2025

Using Microwave and Macroscopic Samples of Dielectric Solids to Study the Photonic Properties of Disordered Photonic Bandgap Materials
Published on: September 26, 2014
Tunable Hypersonic Bandgap Formation in Anisotropic Crystals of Dumbbell Nanoparticles
Hojin Kim1, Abdellatif Gueddida2, Zuyuan Wang3
1Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716, United States.
Abstract:
Phononic materials exhibit mechanical properties that alter the propagation of acoustic waves and are widely useful for metamaterials. To fabricate acoustic materials with phononic bandgaps, colloidal nanoparticles and their assemblies allow access to various crystallinities in the submicrometer scale. We fabricated anisotropic crystals with dumbbell-shaped nanoparticles via field-directed self-assembly. Brillouin light spectroscopy detected the formation of direction-dependent hypersonic phononic bandgaps that scale with the lattice parameters. In addition, the local resonances of the constituent nanoparticles enable metamaterial behavior by opening hybridization gaps in disordered structures. Unexpectedly, this bandgap frequency is robust to changes in the dumbbell aspect ratio. Overall, this study provides a structure-property relationship for designing anisotropic phononic materials with targeted phononic bandgaps.
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