Coupled electromagnetic and elastic dynamics in metamaterials

Metamaterials are well established in the field of electromagnetism, where they have demonstrated a wide variety of exotic material properties. More recently, mechanical metamaterials have also been shown to be quite promising in achieving exotic properties for acoustic waves. Here we discuss an emerging class of metamaterials with both electromagnetic and elastic properties, which are coupled to each other, giving rise to a new range of metamaterial properties. In particular, this can yield a very strong nonlinear response, including bistable states and self-oscillations. We present several structures which exhibit these properties, and experimentally demonstrate their feasibility.