Nonlocal Wave Propagation in Nanoscale Phononic Structures
Summary
Nonlocal wave propagation describes the behaviour of elastic or acoustic waves in materials where interactions extend beyond immediate neighbours, a feature that becomes pronounced at the nanoscale. In phononic structures—engineered composites designed to control vibrational energy—nonlocal effects significantly alter dispersion characteristics, leading to tailored band gaps and localisation phenomena unattainable by classical continuum theories. Incorporating intrinsic length scales into the constitutive models captures size-dependent stiffness and inertia, enabling accurate prediction of cut-off frequencies, group velocities and attenuation rates. These advances underpin the design of ultra-compact filters, waveguides and sensors that exploit sub-wavelength control of phonons. By combining nonlocal elasticity formulations with numerical methods such as transfer-matrix and Bloch-wave analyses, researchers can optimise layer thicknesses, material contrasts and interface parameters to achieve robust wave confinement or directional filtering. Such capabilities are poised to impact thermal management in microelectronics, signal processing in phononic circuits and even quantum information transduction, where precise control of vibrational modes is critical.
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Nonlocal Wave Propagation in Nanoscale Phononic Structures publication trend
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Technical terms
Nonlocal elasticity: A continuum description in which stress at a point depends on strains over a finite neighbourhood, capturing size-dependent mechanical responses.
Phononic structure: An engineered material or metamaterial designed to control mechanical waves (phonons) through periodic or aperiodic variations in elastic properties.
Band structure: A representation of allowed and forbidden frequency ranges (bands and gaps) for wave propagation in a periodic medium as a function of wavevector.
Dispersion relation: The functional dependence of wave frequency on wavevector, governing phase and group velocities in a medium.
References
- Band Structure Analysis of SH Wave Propagating in Nanoscale Layered Metamaterial Structures. Frontiers in Materials (2022).
- Shear-horizontal waves in periodic layered nanostructure with both nonlocal and interface effects. Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (2020).
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