Do Cloaked Objects Really Scatter Less?

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that, due to fundamental physical principles, the overall scattering of any passive, linear, and causal cloaking device cannot be reduced across all frequencies, challenging the notion of perfect invisibility.

Contribution

It establishes a universal principle linking causality and energy conservation to the global scattering behavior of cloaks, providing a quantitative measure for their effectiveness.

Findings

Total scattering increases compared to uncloaked objects.

Thin superconducting shells can reduce global scattering.

Fundamental physical limits constrain cloaking performance.

Abstract

We discuss the global scattering response of invisibility cloaks over the entire frequency spectrum, from static to very high frequencies. Based on linearity, causality and energy conservation we show that the total extinction and scattering, integrated over all wavelengths, of any linear, passive, causal and non-diamagnetic cloak necessarily increases compared to the uncloaked case. In light of this general principle, we provide a quantitative measure to compare the global performance of different cloaking techniques and we discuss solutions to minimize the global scattering signature of an object using thin, superconducting shells. Our results provide important physical insights on how invisibility cloaks operate and affect the global scattering of an object, suggesting ways to defeat countermeasures aimed at detecting cloaked objects using short impinging pulses.