A class of invisible inhomogeneous media and the control of electromagnetic waves

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for designing isotropic inhomogeneous media that can manipulate electromagnetic waves invisibly, enabling deep sub-wavelength control of light and paving the way for nanoscale light propagation tailoring.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to achieve invisibility and wave control using isotropic materials without scattering, including a practical metamaterial structure for infrared applications.

Findings

Invisibility achieved with isotropic inhomogeneous media.

Demonstration of deep sub-wavelength electric field control.

Significant scattering reduction in the proposed metamaterial.

Abstract

We propose a general method to arbitrarily manipulate an electromagnetic wave propagating in a two-dimensional medium, without introducing any scattering. This leads to a whole class of isotropic spatially varying permittivity and permeability profiles that are invisible while shaping the field magnitude and/or phase. In addition, we propose a metamaterial structure working in the infrared that demonstrates deep sub-wavelength control of the electric field amplitude and strong reduction of the scattering. This work offers an alternative strategy to achieve invisibility with isotropic materials and paves the way for tailoring the propagation of light at the nanoscale