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Bulk acoustic wave delay line in acoustic superlattice Appl. Phys. Lett. 97, 092905 (2010); 10.1063/1.3476350 Robustness of computational time reversal imaging in media with elastic constant uncertaintiesRecent progress in electronic and electromagnetic topological insulators has led to the demonstration of one way propagation of electron and photon edge states and the possibility of immunity to backscattering by edge defects. Unfortunately, such topologically protected propagation of waves in the bulk of a material has not been observed. We show, in the case of sound/elastic waves, that bulk waves with unidirectional backscattering-immune topological states can be observed in a time-dependent elastic superlattice. The superlattice is realized via spatial and temporal modulation of the stiffness of an elastic material. Bulk elastic waves in this superlattice are supported by a manifold in momentum space with the topology of a single twist M€ obius strip. Our results demonstrate the possibility of attaining one way transport and immunity to scattering of bulk elastic waves. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

Physical properties of materials are known to be different from the bulk at the nanometer scale. In this context, the dependence of optical properties of nanometric gold thin films with respect to film thickness is studied using density functional theory (DFT). We find that the in-plane plasma frequency of the gold thin film decreases with decreasing thickness and that the optical permittivity tensor is highly anisotropic as well as thickness dependent. Quantitative knowledge of planar metal film permittivity's thickness dependence can improve the accuracy and reliability of the designs of plasmonic devices and electromagnetic metamaterials. The strong anisotropy observed may become an alternative method of realizing indefinite media.

A consistent embedding hierarchy is applied to the calculation of binding enthalpies for organophosphate molecules to a silica surface and compared to experiment. The interaction of four probe molecules, dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), diisopropyl methylphosphonate (DIMP), diisopropyl fluorophosphate (DFP), and sarin, with the silica surface is examined. Quantum chemical methods are employed to compute binding enthalpies and vibrational spectra for all interactions between probe molecules and silanol sites on the silica surface. Comparison with experimentally measured infrared shifts indicates that the theoretically modeled adsorption sites are similar to those found in experiment. The calculated binding enthalpies agree well with experiment for sarin, ΔH ads,443K = −22.0 kcal/mol (calculated) vs −18.8 ± 5.5 kcal/mol (measured, 433 K < T expt < 453 K), and DIMP, ΔH ads,463K = −26.9 kcal/mol (calculated) vs −29.3 ± 0.9 kcal/mol (measured, 453 K < T expt < 473 K). Agreement with experiment is less good for DMMP, ΔH ads,463K = −19.7 kcal/mol (calculated) vs −26.1 ± 1.5 kcal/mol (measured, 453 K < T expt < 473 K), and DFP, ΔH ads,423K = −20.4 kcal/mol (calculated) vs −27.5 ± 3.1 kcal/mol (measured, 413 K < T expt < 433 K).