A new type of cloak is discussed: one that gives all cloaked objects the appearance of a flat conducting sheet. It has the advantage that none of the parameters of the cloak is singular and can in fact be made isotropic. It makes broadband cloaking in the optical frequencies one step closer.
Recently, researchers have proposed several carpet cloaking designs that are able to hide a real object under a bump in a way that it is perceived as a flat ground plane. Here, we present a method to design two-dimensional isotropic carpet cloaking devices using Laplace transformation. We show that each functional form of a Laplace transformation corresponds to a different carpet cloaking design. Therefore, our approach allows us to systematically design a rich variety of cloaking devices. Our analysis includes several examples containing different bump geometries that illustrate the proposed …
Transformation optics is a design tool that connects geometry of space and propagation of light. Invisibility cloaking is a corresponding benchmark example. Recent experiments at optical frequencies have demonstrated cloaking for the light amplitude ("ray cloaking"). In this Letter, we demonstrate far-field cloaking of the light phase ("wave cloaking") by interferometric microscope-imaging experiments on the previously introduced three-dimensional carpet cloak at 700-nm wavelength and for arbitrary polarization of light.
In the past few years, carpet cloaking attracted interests because of its feasibility at optical frequencies and potential in stealth technologies. Metasurfaces have been proposed as a method to engineer ultra-thin carpet cloaking surfaces due to their abilities to manipulate wavefronts, polarization, and phase at subwavelength scale. However, achieving broadband carpet cloaking with a significant bandwidth is one of the key remaining challenges for metasurface designs. To date, broadband carpet cloaking based on metasurfaces has not been achieved and cloaking is limited to discrete wavelength…
In view of the fact that most invisibility devices focus on linear polarization cloaking and that the characteristics of mid infrared cloaking are rarely studied, we propose a cross circularly polarized invisibility carpet cloaking device in the mid infrared band. Based on the Pancharatnam Berry phase principle, the unit cells with the cross circular polarization gradient phase were carefully designed and constructed into a metasurface. In order to achieve tunable cross circular polarization carpet cloaks, a phase change material is introduced into the design of the unit structure. When the ph…
Carpet cloaking is proposed to hide an object on a dielectric half-space from electromagnetic (EM) detection. A two-dimensional conformal transformation specified by an analytic function is utilized for the design. Only one nonsingular material parameter distribution suffices for the characterization. The cloaking cover situates on the dielectric half-space, and consists of a lossless upper part for EM wave redirection and an absorbing bottom layer for inducing correct reflection coefficient and absorbing transmission. Numerical simulations with Gaussian beam incidence are performed for verifi…
We demonstrate in this letter a unique approach for watching outside while hiding in a carpet cloaking based on transformation optics. Unlike conventional carpet cloaking, which screens all the incident electromagnetic waves, we break the cloak and allow incident light get into the carpet. Hence outside information is detected inside the cloak. To recover the invisible cloaking, complementary techniques are applied in the broken space. Consequently, a hiding-inside-and-watching-outside (HIWO) carpet cloak is sewed, which works as a perfectly invisible cloaking and allows surveillance of the ou…
We demonstrate a novel and simple approach to cloaking a scatterer on a ground plane. We use an extremely thin dielectric metasurface (λ/12) to reshape the wavefronts distorted by a scatterer in order to mimic the reflection pattern of a flat ground plane. To achieve such carpet cloaking, the reflection angle has to be equal to the incident angle everywhere on the scatterer. We use a graded metasurface and calculate the required phase gradient to achieve cloaking. Our metasurface locally provides additional phase to the wavefronts to compensate for the phase difference amongst light paths indu…
Grating cloaks are a variation of dielectric carpet (or ground- plane) cloaks. The latter were introduced by Li and Pendry. In contrast to the numerical work involved in the quasi-conformal carpet cloak, the refractive-index profile of a conformal grating cloak follows a closed and exact analytical form. We have previously mentioned that finite-size conformal grating cloaks may exhibit better cloaking than usual finite-size carpet cloaks. In this letter, we directly visualize their performance using photorealistic ray-tracing simulations. We employ a Newtonian approach that is advantageous com…
Based on transformation optics (TO), we present and experimentally realize a new thermal carpet cloak. The device, which we call a "thermal carpet", provides a considerable cloaking effect. The device is designed, fabricated and measured to verify the thermal cloaking performance. In comparison with previous experimental work, the advantage of this design is that the required medium parameter is inherently isotropic and thus easier to fabricate.
Based on transformation optics theory, we present a new carpet device that can be used to thermally protect a region from the invasion of external heat flux. The designed device is termed 'thermal carpet', which provides considerable cloaking effect. The cloaking performance for heat flux originating from different directions are analyzed. Unlike most thermal cloak designs reported in the literature, the material parameters are constant with position throughout the cloak, indicating that only one type of metamaterial composite to fabricate such a carpet is required.
Invisibility cloaking imposes strict conditions on the refractive index profiles of cloaking media that must be satisfied to successfully hide an object. The first experimental demonstrations of cloaking used artificial metamaterials to respond to this challenge. In this work we show how a much simpler technique of electromagnetically induced transparency can be used to achieve a partial, {\it carpet} cloaking at optical frequencies in atomic vapours or solids. To generate a desired combination of low absorption with strong modifications of the refractive index, we use chiral media with an ind…
Through a particularly chosen coordinate transformation, we propose an optical carpet cloak that only requires homogeneous anisotropic dielectric material. The proposed cloak could be easily imitated and realized by alternative layers of isotropic dielectrics. To demonstrate the cloaking performance, we have designed a two-dimensional version that a uniform silicon grating structure fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator wafer could work as an infrared carpet cloak. The cloak has been validated through full wave electromagnetic simulations, and the non-resonance feature also enables a broadband …
Carpets under consideration here, in the context of pressure acoustic waves propagating in a compressible fluid, do not touch the ground: they levitate in mid-air (or float in mid-water), which leads to approximate cloaking for an object hidden underneath, or touching either sides of a square cylinder on, or over, the ground. The tentlike carpets attached to the sides of a square cylinder illustrate how the notion of a carpet on a wall naturally generalizes to sides of other small compact objects. We then extend the concept of flying carpets to circular cylinders. However, instead of reducing …
An approach to hiding objects levitating or flying above a conducting sheet is suggested in this letter. The proposed device makes use of isotropic negative-refractive-index materials without extreme material parameters, and creates an illusion of a remote conducting sheet. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate the performance of this cloak in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) cases.
The invisibility cloak has been a long-standing dream for many researchers over the decades. The introduction of transformational optics has revitalized this field by providing a general method to design material distributions to hide the subject from detection. By transforming space and light propagation, a three-dimensional (3D) object is perceived as having a reduced number of dimensions, in the form of points, lines, and thin sheets, making it "undetectable" judging from the scattered field. Although a variety of cloaking devices have been reported at microwave and optical frequencies, the…
We demonstrate three simple cloaking devices that can hide very large spatial objects over the entire visible spectrum using only passive, off-the-shelf optics. The cloaked region for all of the devices exceeds 10^6 mm3 with the largest exceeding 10^8 mm3. Although uni-directional, these cloaks can hide the cloaked object, even if the object is transversely or self-illuminated. Owing to the small usable solid angle, but simple scaling, these cloaks may be of value in hiding small field-of-view objects such as mid- to high-earth orbit satellites.
We report on a new concept of cloaking objects in diffusive light regime using the paradigm of the scattering cancellation and mantle cloaking techniques. We show numerically that an object can be made completely invisible to diffusive photon density waves, by tailoring the diffusivity constant of the spherical shell enclosing the object. This means that photons' flow outside the object and the cloak made of these spherical shells behaves as if the object were not present. Diffusive light invisibility may open new vistas in hiding hot spots in infrared thermography or tissue imaging.
Invisibility cloaks of light, which used to be confined to the imagination, have now been turned into a scientific reality, thanks to the enabling theoretical tools of transformation optics and conformal mapping. Inspired by those theoretical works, the experimental realisation of electromagnetic invisibility cloaks has been reported at various electromagnetic frequencies. All the invisibility cloaks demonstrated thus far, however, have relied on nano- or micro-fabricated artificial composite materials with spatially varying electromagnetic properties, which limit the size of the cloaked regio…
Invisibility cloaking not only catches the human imagination, but also promises fascinating applications in optics and photonics. By manipulating electromagnetic waves with metamaterials, researchers have been able to realize electromagnetic cloaking in the microwave, terahertz and optical regimes. Nevertheless, the complex design and fabrication process, narrow bandwidth, and high intrinsic losses in the metamaterial-based cloaks have imposed intractable limitations on their realistic applications. Seeking new approaches to overcome these perceived disadvantages is in progress. Here by using …
We present the design, fabrication and performance test of a quasi three-dimensional carpet cloak made of normal dielectric in the microwave regime. Taking advantage of a simple linear coordinate transformation we design a carpet cloak with homogeneous anisotropic medium and then practically realize the device with multilayer of alternating normal dielectric slabs based on the effective medium theory. As a proof-of-concept example, we fabricate the carpet cloak with multilayer of FR4 dielectric slabs with air spacing. The performance of the fabricated design is verified through full-wave numer…
Optical cloaking consists in hiding from sight an object by properly deviating the light that comes from it. An optical cloaking device (OCD) is an artifact that hides the object and, at the same time, its presence is not (or should not be) noticeable for the observer, who will have the impression of being looking through it. At the level of paraxial geometrical optics, suitable for undergraduate courses, simple OCDs can be built by combining a series of lenses. With this motivation, here we present an analysis of a simple projective OCD arrangement. First, a simple theoretical account in term…
In this study, the design of a directional cloaking based on the Luneburg lens system is proposed and its operating principle is experimentally verified. The cloaking concept is analytically investigated via geometrical optics and numerically realized with the help of the finite-difference time-domain method. In order to benefit from its unique focusing and/or collimating characteristics of light, the Luneburg lens is used. We show that by the proper combination of Luneburg lenses in an array form, incident light bypasses the region between junctions of the lenses, i.e., the "dark zone." Hence…