Transformation-optics macroscopic visible-light cloaking beyond two dimensions

Abstract

Transformation optics, a recent geometrical design strategy of controlling light by combining Maxwell's principles of electromagnetism with Einstein's general relativity, promises without precedent an invisibility cloaking device that can render a macroscopic object invisible in three dimensions. However, most previous proof-of-concept transformation-optics cloaking devices focused predominantly on two dimensions, whereas detection of a macroscopic object along its third dimension was always unfailing. Here, we report the first experimental demonstration of transformation-optics macroscopic visible-light cloaking beyond two dimensions. This almost-three-dimensional cloak exhibits three-dimensional (3D) invisibility for illumination near its center (i.e. with a limited field of view), and its ideal wide-angle invisibility performance is preserved in multiple two-dimensional (2D) planes intersecting in the 3D space. Both light ray trajectories and optical path lengths have been verified experimentally at the macroscopic scale, which provides unique evidence on the geometrical nature of transformation optics.

References in corpus (9)

• Optical Cloaking with Non-Magnetic Metamaterials
• Hiding Under the Carpet: a New Strategy for Cloaking
• Dielectric Optical Cloak
• Silicon nanostructure cloak operating at optical frequencies
• Macroscopic Invisibility Cloaking of Visible Light
• Macroscopic Invisibility Cloak for Visible Light
• Lateral Shift Makes a Ground-Plane Cloak Detectable
• A Rigorous Analysis of Plane-transformed Invisibility Cloaks
• Electromagnetic cloaking in the visible frequency range