Acoustically invisible gateways (Q534504)

In recent years, a majority of publications have dealt with the problem of invisible objects in electromagnetic (EM) or acoustic (AC) media under the assumption that no radiation can get into the concealed volume, nor can any radiation get out. Due to the military motivation, many efforts have been made in order to obtain a realizable plan for designing a so-called electromagnetic or acoustic cloaking. For example, through a coordinate transformation, the values of the EM permittivity and permeability in the new coordinate system can be renormalized, so that the cloaking can be easily realized. Based on the recent work of \textit{A. Aleksenko} and \textit{A. Plakhov} [Nonlinearity 22, No. 6, 1247--1258 (2009; Zbl 1173.37035)] concerning the problem of a parallel flow of particles falling on a body with piecewise smooth boundary and leaving no trace, the authors consider an analogous problem of acoustic scattering of a plane wave illuminating the same body. It is shown with the use of Kirchhoff approximation and geometric theory of diffraction, that at high frequencies, the scattered far field in a range of observed directions, e.g., for the back scattered direction, is zero for a discrete set of wave numbers. That is the body is acoustically ``invisible'' in that direction.