Nature Communications (Aug 2016)

Hydrogel microphones for stealthy underwater listening

  • Yang Gao,
  • Jingfeng Song,
  • Shumin Li,
  • Christian Elowsky,
  • You Zhou,
  • Stephen Ducharme,
  • Yong Mei Chen,
  • Qin Zhou,
  • Li Tan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12316
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 11

Abstract

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Conventional ceramic SONAR suffers from large acoustic impedance mismatch with water, rendering them easily detectable. Here, Gao et al. report a new design using a hydrogel filled with stimuli-responsive metal nanoparticles, which detects low-frequency sound with a high-sensitivity and zero-reflection.