Seismic metamaterial: how to shake friends and influence waves?

Abstract

Materials engineered at the micro- and nano-meter scale have had a tremendous and lasting impact in photonics and phononics, with applications ranging from periodic structures disallowing light and sound propagation at stop band frequencies, to subwavelength focussing and cloaking with metamaterials. Here, we present the description of a seismic test held on a soil structured at the meter scale using vibrocompaction probes. The most simplistic way to interact with a seismic wave is to modify the global properties of the medium, acting on the soil density and then on the wave velocity. The main concept is then to reduce the amplification of seismic waves at the free surface, called site effects in earthquake engineering. However, an alternative way to counteract the seismic signal is by modifying the distribution of seismic energy thanks to a metamaterial made of a grid of vertical, cylindrical and empty inclusions bored in the initial soil, in agreement with numerical simulations using an approximate plate model.