Speaker: 

Distinguished Professor Graeme Milton

Institution: 

University of Utah

Time: 

Thursday, May 10, 2012 - 4:00pm

Location: 

Natural Sciences 2 Room 1201

Composite materials can have properties unlike any found in nature, and in this case they are known as metamaterials. Recent attention has been focused on obtaining metamaterials which have an interesting dynamic behavior. Their effective mass density can be anisotropic, negative, or even complex. Even the eigenvectors of the effective mass density tensor can vary with frequency. Within the framework of linear elasticity, internal masses can cause the effective elasticity tensor to be frequency dependent, yet not contribute at all to the effective mass density at any frequency. One may use coordinate transformations of the elastodynamic equations to get novel unexpected behavior. A classical propagating wave can have a strange behavior in the new abstract coordinate system. However the problem becomes to find metamaterials which realize the behavior in the new coordinate system. This can be solved at a discrete level, by replacing the original elastic material with a network of masses and springs and then applying transformations to this network. The realization of the transformed network requires a new type of spring, which we call a torque spring. The forces at the end of the torque spring are equal and opposite but not aligned with the line joining the spring ends. We show how torque springs can theoretically be realized. This is joint work with Lindsay Botton, Mark Briane, Andrej Cherkaev, Fernando Guevara Vasquez, Ross McPhedran, Nicolae Nicorovici, Daniel Onofrei, Pierre Seppecher, and John Willis.