Watching outside while under a carpet cloak of invisibility

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel carpet cloak design that allows observing outside while remaining invisible, by breaking the cloak and then restoring its invisibility with complementary techniques.

Contribution

The work introduces a unique approach to achieve simultaneous cloaking and surveillance by breaking and restoring the cloak using transformation optics.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated a cloak that hides and observes simultaneously.

Achieved cloaking with the ability to detect outside information.

Proposed a strategy for ideal cloaks with dual functions.

Abstract

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 outside at the same time. Our work provides a strategy for ideal cloak with "hiding" and "watching" functions simultaneously.