Guiding and confinement of interface acoustic waves in solid-fluid pillar-based phononic crystals

Pillar-based phononic crystals exhibit some unique wave phenomena due to the interaction between surface acoustic modes of the substrate and local resonances supported by pillars. In this paper, we extend the investigations by taking into account the presence of a liquid medium. We particularly demonstrate that local resonances dramatically decrease the phase velocity of Scholte-Stoneley wave, which leads to a slow wave at the solid/fluid interface. Moreover, we show that increasing the height of pillars introduces a new set of branches of interface modes and drastically affects the acoustic energy localization. Indeed, while some modes display a highly confined pressure between pillars, others exponentially decay in the fluid or only propagate in the solid without disturbing the fluid pressure. These theoretical results, performed by finite element method, highlight a new acoustic wave confinement suitable in various applications such as acoustophoresis, lab on chip and microfluidics.