Recently, invisible cloaks have attracted much attention due to their exciting property of invisibility, which are based on a solid theory of transformation optics and quasi-conformal mapping. Two kinds of cloaks have been proposed: free-space cloaks, which can render objects in free space invisible to incident radiation, and carpet cloaks (or ground cloaks), which can hide objects under the conducting ground. The first free-space and carpet cloaks were realized in the microwave frequencies using metamaterials. The free-space cloak was composed of resonant metamaterials, and hence had restriction of narrow bandwidth and high loss; the carpet cloak was made of non-resonant metamaterials, which have broad bandwidth and low loss. However, the carpet cloak has a severe restriction of large size compared to the cloaked object. The above restrictions become the bottlenecks to the real applications of free-space and carpet cloaks. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of broadband and low-loss directive free-space cloak and compact-sized carpet cloak based on a recent theoretical study. Both cloaks are realized using non-resonant metamaterials in the microwave frequency, and good invisibility properties have been observed in experiments. This approach represents a major step towards the real applications of invisibility cloaks.
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…
Thanks to the pioneering studies conducted on the fields of transformation optics (TO) and metasurfaces, many unprecedented devices such as invisibility cloaks have been recently realized. However, each of these methods has some drawbacks limiting the applicability of the designed devices for real-life scenarios. For instance, TO studies lead to bulky coating layer with the thickness that is comparable to, or even larger than the dimension of the concealed object. In this paper, based on the coordinate transformation, an ultrathin carpet cloak is proposed to hide objects with arbitrary shape a…
This note is a comment on a recent article [Tsakmakidis, et al., Nat Commun 10 (2019)] that presents a thought-provoking proposal to overcome the bandwidth restrictions of invisibility cloaks based on using media that support superluminal (faster than light in free space) group and phase velocities. As illustrated in Fig. 1 of the original article, a wave packet propagating through such a fast-light cloak is alleged to be able to reach the side behind the cloaked object simultaneously with a corresponding wave packet propagating through the shorter, direct route in free space without the objec…
