The META-FORET project is a large-scale wave manipulation with a multidisciplinary approach devised by a team composed of physicists, geophysicists and engineers.
The goal of the META-FORET project is to demonstrate that metamaterial physics that are classically observed at small scale in optics or acoustics as a way to cancel or bend waves can exist at the very large scale in geophysics.

In practice, the goal of the META-FORET project is to achieve two ambitious and novel experiments where 1000 seismic sensors that is to be set up on the two seismic metamaterials.

We wish to demonstrate :
– The first configuration deals with the interaction between a surface wave and a natural forest. Each tree within the forest can react as a resonator that traps a small part of the seismic waves propagating at the Earth surface. The collective behavior of the trees when arranged in a dense forest is then analogous to the physics observed at a very small scale in optical metamaterials.
– In the second configuration, we aim to show that a particular spatial distribution of long and thin vertical inclusions in the ground (concrete columns) surrounding a structure can create a special seismic lens that diverts surface waves away from the inner region leaving the protected object almost untouched.