Remote Water-to-Air Eavesdropping With a Phase-Engineered Impedance Matching Metasurface.

Efficiently receiving underwater sound remotely from air is a long-standing challenge in acoustics hindered by the large impedance mismatch at the water-air interface. Here, a phase-engineered water-air impedance matching metasurface is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for remote and efficient water-to-air eavesdropping. The judiciously-designed metasurface with near-unity transmission efficiency, long monitoring distance and high mechanical stiffness is capable of making the water-air interface acoustically transparent and at the same time freewheelingly patterning the transmitted wavefront. This enables efficient control over the effective spatial location of a distant airborne sensor such that it can measure underwater signals with large signal-to-noise ratio as if placed close to the physical underwater source. Such airborne eavesdropping of underwater sound is experimentally demonstrated with a measured sensitivity enhancement of nearly 10 4 at 8 kHz, far from achievable with the current state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the opportunities of using the proposed metasurface for cross-media orbital-angular-momentum-multiplexed communication and underwater acoustic window are also demonstrated. Our metasurface opens new avenues for communication and sensing in inhomogeneities with totally-reflective interfaces, which may be translated to nano-optics and radio-frequencies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.