Ultrathin carpet cloak enabled by infinitely anisotropic medium

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ultrathin carpet cloak using an infinitely anisotropic medium that effectively hides objects of arbitrary shape from all viewing angles, overcoming limitations of previous cloaking methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, practical ultrathin cloak based on an infinitely anisotropic medium, simplifying design and broadening real-world applicability of invisibility cloaks.

Findings

The proposed IAM cloak is effective from all viewing angles.

Full-wave simulations confirm the cloak's performance.

Effective medium theory implementation matches theoretical predictions.

Abstract

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 and size using a thin anisotropic material, called as infinitely anisotropic medium (IAM). It is shown that unlike the previous metasurface-based carpet cloaks, the proposed IAM hides objects from all viewing incident angles while it is extremely thin compared with the object dimensions. This material also circumvents the conventional transformation optics complexities and could be easily implemented in practical scenarios. To demonstrate the capability of the proposed carpet cloak, several full-wave simulations are carried out. Finally, as a proof of concept, the IAM is implemented based on the effective medium theory which exhibits good agreement with the results obtained from the theoretical investigations. The introduced material not only constitutes a significant step towards the invisibility cloak but also can greatly promote the practical application of the other TO-based devices.