Three-dimensional acoustic lensing with a bubbly diamond metamaterial.

A sound wave travelling in water is scattered by a periodic assembly of air bubbles. The local structure matters even in the low frequency regime. If the bubbles are arranged in a face-centered cubic (fcc) lattice, a total band gap opens near the Minnaert resonance frequency. If they are arranged in the diamond structure, which one obtains by simply adding a second bubble to the unit cell, one finds an additional branch with a negative slope (optical branch). For a single specific frequency, the medium behaves as if its refractive index (relative to water) is exactly $n=-1$. We show that a slab of this material can be used to design a three three-dimensional flat lens. We also report super-resolution focusing in the near field of the slab and illustrate its potential for imaging in three dimensions.