Creating a Synthetic Sense of Length by Electromechanical Metamolecules

We introduce hybrid-wave electromechanical meta-atoms and metamolecules that consist of coupled electrical and mechanical oscillators with similar resonance frequencies. We demonstrate that by exploiting the hybrid-wave interaction one may enable functionalities that are forbidden otherwise. For example, we show a dimer metamolecule that is highly directional for electromagnetic waves, although it is electrically deep subwavelength. This is a consequence of the fact that while the metamolecule is electrically small, it is acoustically large. This concept opens ways for a plethora of exciting dynamics and phenomena in electromagnetics and acoustics, with implications for miniaturized sensors, super-resolution imaging, compact nonreciprocal antennas and more.