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  • Open Access

Microscale Architected Materials for Elastic Waveguiding: Fabrication and Dynamic Characterization across Length and Time Scales

Vignesh Kannan*,§

Charles Dorn†,§

Ute Drechsler

Dennis M. Kochmann‡

  • Mechanics & Materials Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland

  • *Contact author: vignesh.kannan@polytechnique.edu
  • †Contact author: cdorn@uw.edu
  • ‡Contact author: dmk@ethz.ch
  • §Also at Mechanics & Materials Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland.
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Phys. Rev. X 16, 011047 – Published 5 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/21w4-zn1s

Abstract

We present an experimental protocol for the fabrication and characterization of scalable microarchitected elastic waveguides. Using silicon microfabrication techniques, we develop free-standing 2D truss-based architected waveguides with a maximum diameter of 80 mm, unit cells size of 100  μm, and minimum beam width of 5  μm, thus achieving scale separation. To characterize elastic wave propagation, we introduce a custom-built scanning optical pump-probe experiment that enables contactless excitation of elastic wave modes and full spatiotemporal reconstruction of wave propagation across hundreds of unit cells with subunit cell resolution. Results on periodic architectures show excellent agreement with finite element simulations and equivalent experimental data at larger length scales. Motivated by scalable computational inverse design, we fabricate a specific example of a spatially graded waveguide and demonstrate its ability to guide elastic waves along an arbitrary predesigned path.

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Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Popular Summary

Architected materials offer extreme, peculiar, or desired properties through a careful structural design across scales. The control of elastic wave propagation through an architected material is particularly exciting and challenging. Careful design and fabrication of the architecture down to the smallest functional length scale achieves this control. Fundamental experimental studies are complex due to limitations in fabricating materials with a large number of unit cells, exciting and measuring elastic waves with high resolution, and separating the structural and material effects on wave dispersion. We overcome these limitations by fabricating microarchitected materials on silicon wafers and characterizing their dispersion behavior using a photoacoustic pump-probe experiment. We achieved a high density of unit cells in a single mechanical waveguiding device where the unit cell sizes are orders of magnitude smaller than the membrane itself. This allows for measurements of wave propagation that closely match with equivalent samples of larger sizes and the use of a nonperiodic architecture to guide a wave along a complex trajectory.

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Phys. Rev. X 16, 011047– Published 5 March, 2026
  • Received 15 July 2025
  • Accepted 5 February 2026
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