| Summary: | Photonic or phononic crystals and metamaterials, due to their very different typical spatial scales—wavelength and deep subwavelength—and underlying physical mechanisms—Bragg interferences or local resonances—, are often considered to be very different composite media. As such, while the former are commonly used to manipulate and control waves at the scale of the unit cell, i.e., wavelength, the latter are usually considered for their effective properties. Yet we have shown in the last few years that under some approximations, metamaterials can be used as photonic or phononic crystals, with the great advantage that they are much more compact. In this review, we will concentrate on metamaterials made out of soda cans, that is, Helmholtz resonators of deep subwavelength dimensions. We will first show that their properties can be understood, likewise phononic crystals, as resulting from interferences only, through multiple scattering effects and Fano interferences. Then, we will demonstrate that below the resonance frequency of its unit cell, a soda can metamaterial supports a band of subwavelength varying modes, which can be excited coherently using time reversal, in order to beat the diffraction limit from the far field. Above this frequency, the metamaterial supports a band gap, which we will use to demonstrate cavities and waveguides, very similar to those obtained in phononic crystals, albeit of deep subwavelength dimensions. We will finally show that multiple scattering can be taken advantage of in these metamaterials, by correctly structuring them. This allows to turn a metamaterial with a single negative effective property into a negative index metamaterial, which refracts waves negatively, hence acting as a superlens.
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