Stealth Acoustic Materials

We report the experimental design of a one-dimensional stealth acoustic material, namely a material that suppresses the acoustic scattering for a given set of incident wave vectors. The material consists of multiple scatterers, rigid diaphragms, located in an air-filled acoustic waveguide. The position of the scatterers has been chosen such that in the Born approximation a suppression of the scattering for a broad range of frequencies is achieved and thus a broadband transparency. Experimental results are found in excellent agreement with the theory despite the presence of losses and the finite size of the material, features that are not captured in the theory. This robustness as well as the generality of the results motivates realistic potential applications for the design of transparent materials in acoustics and other fields of wave physics.