Active Electromagnetic Cloaking

7765 Words32 Pages
Active electromagnetic cloaking I. INTRODUCTION Cloaking an object from an electromagnetic field represents a major advancement in the ability to control and manipulate electromagnetic radiation, The concept of cloaking an object from an incident electromagnetic wave has spurred many different perspectives on how the scattering off of an object can be managed. Cloaking is accomplished by covering an object with an anisotropic and inhomogeneous material shell that bends the incident field around the interior volume. This bending allows for any object that fits inside that volume to be hidden, an approach that belongs to the general field of ‘‘transformation optics.’’ This rerouting of the incident field comes at the trade-off of requiring extreme material parameters (the permittivity and permeability approaching either zero or infinity). Such an approach is the most general form of material-based cloaking for a monochromatic plane wave, as it can hide any object from any incident field. However, it is not ideal for pulses because of the dispersion inherent in the material parameters and the inherent bending of the fields around the object that is required. No material-based electromagnetic cloaks can causally respond to a pulse. Such a metamaterial cloak is also the most difficult to implement and requires approximating the ideal parameters, as well as electrically thick shells that are limited by losses. Plasmonic cloaking uses the size of the object and its material composition to tailor the scattering of the object. By assuming an electrically small object, the scattering can be described by its lowest-order scattering term (the monopole or dipole term, depending on the object), which gives rise to a cloak made up of a homogeneous plasmonic shell (permittivity < 0). This shell can also be reduced to a low-profile surface described by an inductive

More about Active Electromagnetic Cloaking

Open Document