Alternative Derivation of Electromagnetic Cloaks and Concentrators

TL;DR

This paper presents a new boundary value formulation for electromagnetic cloaks and concentrators, deriving explicit material parameters and field conditions for spherical and cylindrical geometries, and discusses limitations at static and low frequencies.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified boundary value approach to design electromagnetic cloaks and concentrators with explicit formulas, highlighting differences between spherical and cylindrical cases.

Findings

Explicit formulas for cloaking materials derived

Spherical and cylindrical cloaks exhibit different boundary conditions

Electrostatic cloaking and low-frequency cloaking are not feasible

Abstract

Beginning with a straightforward formulation of electromagnetic cloaking that reduces to a boundary value problem involving a single Maxwell first-order differential equation, explicit formulae for the relative permittivity-permeability dyadic and fields of spherical and circular cylindrical annular cloaks are derived in terms of general compressed radial coordinate functions. The general formulation is based on the requirements that the cloaking occurs for all possible incident fields and that the cloaks with frequency w > 0 have continuous tangential E and H fields across their outer surfaces, and zero normal D and B fields at their inner material surfaces. The tangential-field boundary conditions at the outer surface of the cloak ensure zero scattered fields, and the normal-field boundary conditions at the inner surface of the cloak are compatible with zero total fields inside the interior cavity of the cloak. For spherical cloaks, unlike cylindrical cloaks, these boundary conditions lead to all the tangential components of the E and H fields being continuously zero across their inner surfaces -- cylindrical cloaks having delta functions in polarization densities at their inner surfaces. For bodies with no interior free-space cavities, the formulation is used to derive nonscattering spherical and cylindrical concentrators that magnify the incident fields near their centers. For static fields (w = 0), the boundary value formulation is appropriately modified to obtain a permeability dyadic that will cloak magnetostatic fields. Causality conditions imply that, unlike magnetostatic cloaking, electrostatic cloaking as well as low-frequency cloaking for w > 0 is not realizable.