Guest Speaker: Prof. Badreddine Assouar
University of Lorraine & CNRS
France
Prof. Badreddine Assouar received his PhD degree in Materials Physics from Nancy University in France in 2001. In 2002, he became a Research Scientist at CNRS in France. He obtained his habilitation to supervise research in 2007 and became a Research Professor. In 2010, he joined Georgia Institute of Technology in USA as visiting Professor, where he spent 2 years, developing researches on metamaterials. He afterwards founded the “Acoustics Metamaterials and Phononics” group at the University of Lorraine where he is developing researches on acoustic/elastic metamaterials, metasurfaces and phononics. He is currently a Director of Research at the CNRS, and the Director of the LabCom MOLIERE, a joint industrial-academic research unit focused on innovative functional materials for aeronautics. In 2024, Prof. Assouar has been elected a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. He is also serving as Associate Editor with Physical Review Applied since 2019.
Prof. Assouar is author or co-author of more than 165 international peer reviewed publications, in leading international journals including, Phys. Rev. Lett., Nature Review Materials, Advanced Materials, Nature Communications, Science Advances and more than 50 invited talks and keynotes over the world. This has led to highly recognition of his works and achievements over the past 20 years, as indicated by the high citations rate his works has collected (11000 citations, and h-index of 59).
Abstract
The ability to manipulate and structure sound and vibration with precision has long been a central goal in acoustics and mechanical engineering. Recent advances in the design of metastructures, engineered architectures with tailored wavelength or subwavelength features, have opened new frontiers in this pursuit. These structures enable unprecedented control over wave propagation, reflection, absorption, transmission and localization, far beyond the limits of conventional materials.
In this seminar, I will present an overview of some recent research developments in the field of acoustic and elastic metastructures, with a focus on how these architected materials can be used sound and vibrations manipulation. Specifically, I will first discuss some recent advances in the concept of elastic BICs. The latter offer a powerful mechanism for achieving infinite quality factor resonances, which are particularly promising for enhancing sound and vibration absorption and developing highly sensitive sensors.
In the second part, I will introduce the emerging concept of phononic skyrmions, topologically nontrivial configurations in elastic fields that mimic their magnetic counterparts. These phononic structures open exciting opportunities for transporting vibrational information in robust, and reconfigurable ways, paving the way for the applications related, for example, to acoustofluidics and microfluidics.
