Acoustoplasmonic Metasurfaces: Bridging Light and Sound for Acoustic Wavefront Shaping

Metasurfaces tailor and manipulate the interaction of waves with matter, enabling versatile control of the phase, polarization, and amplitude of incident waves in transmission and reflection. This perspective explores the underlying mechanisms and future potential of acoustoplasmonic metasurfaces, which bridge the physics of light and sound via largely unexplored degrees of freedom. These operate as transducer metasurfaces, which convert electromagnetic energy into mechanical energy. Focus is furthermore given to electromagnetic and mechanical metasurfaces for wavefront shaping, in which we draw instructive parallels between their mechanisms. We then build on this knowledge to describe the physical framework of acoustoplasmonic metasurfaces and provide an outlook on the future potential of acoustoplasmonics to advance fundamental research and enable impactful applications ranging from high-frequency signal processing to biomedical sensing or high-resolution acoustic imaging.