Ultrawide phononic band gap for combined in-plane and out-of-plane waves
  We consider two-dimensional phononic crystals formed from silicon and voids, and present optimized unit cell designs for (1) out-of-plane, (2) in-plane and (3) combined out-of-plane and in-plane elastic wave propagation. To feasibly search through an excessively large design space (10e40 possible realizations) we develop a specialized genetic algorithm and utilize it in conjunction with the reduced Bloch mode expansion method for fast band structure calculations. Focusing on high symmetry plain-strain square lattices, we report unit cell designs exhibiting record values of normalized band-gap size for all three categories. For the combined polarizations case, we reveal a design with a normalized band-gap size exceeding 60%. 
Osama R. Bilal and Mahmoud I. Hussein
physics.comp-ph cond-mat.mtrl-sci