Twist-Induced Hyperbolic Shear Metasurfaces

Following the discovery of moiré-driven superconductivity and density waves in twisted-graphene multilayers, twistronics has spurred a surge of interest in tailored broken symmetries through angular rotations enabling new properties, from electronics to photonics and phononics. Analogously, in monoclinic polar crystals a nontrivial angle between nondegenerate dipolar phonon resonances can naturally emerge due to asymmetries in their crystal lattice, and its variations are associated with intriguing polaritonic phenomena, including axial dispersion, i.e., the rotation of the optical axis with frequency, and microscopic shear effects that result in an asymmetric distribution of material loss. So far, these phenomena have been restricted to specific midinfrared frequencies difficult to access with conventional laser sources and fundamentally limited by the degree of asymmetry and by the strength of light-matter interactions available in natural crystals. Here, we leverage the twistronics concept to demonstrate maximal axial dispersion and loss redistribution of hyperbolic waves in elastic metasurfaces, achieved by tailoring the angle between coupled metasurface pairs featuring tailored anisotropy. We show extreme control over elastic wave dispersion and absorption via the twist angle and leverage the resulting phenomena to demonstrate enhanced propagation distance, in-plane reflection-free negative refraction and diffraction-free defect detection. Our work welds the concepts of twistronics, non-Hermiticity, and extreme anisotropy, demonstrating the powerful opportunities enabled by metasurfaces for tunable, highly directional surface-acoustic-wave propagation of great interest for a wide range of applications spanning from seismic mitigation to on-chip phononics and wireless communication systems, hence paving the way toward their translation into emerging photonic and polaritonic metasurface technologies.