Achieving transparency with plasmonic coatings

TL;DR

This paper explores how plasmonic coatings can be designed to significantly reduce scattering from objects, potentially making them nearly invisible, with implications for stealth and non-invasive sensing.

Contribution

It demonstrates that lossless plasmonic covers near plasma resonance can drastically decrease scattering cross sections, offering a novel approach to control object visibility.

Findings

Design of plasmonic coatings reduces scattering cross section

Near plasma resonance enhances invisibility effects

Numerical results support theoretical predictions

Abstract

The possibility of using plasmonic covers to drastically reduce the total scattering cross section of spherical and cylindrical objects is discussed. While it is intuitively expected that increasing the physical size of an object may lead to an increase in its overall scattering cross section, here we see how a proper design of these lossless metamaterial covers near their plasma resonance may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer, a phenomenon with obvious applications for low observability and non invasive probe design. Physical insights into this phenomenon and some numerical results are provided.