Notes on conformal invisibility devices

By Ulf Leonhardt. 2006

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As a consequence of the wave nature of light, invisibility devices based on isotropic media cannot be perfect. The principal distortions of invisibility are due to reflections and time delays. Reflections can be made exponentially small for devices that are large in comparison with the wavelength of light. Time delays are unavoidable and will result in wave-front dislocations. This paper considers invisibility devices based on optical conformal mapping. The paper shows that the time delays do not depend on the directions and impact parameters of incident light rays, although the refractive-index profile of any conformal invisibility device is necessarily asymmetric. The distortions of images are thus uniform, which reduces the risk of detection. The paper also shows how the ideas of invisibility devices are connected to the transmutation of force, the stereographic projection and Escheresque tilings of the plane.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9aa6973f4740c65ffcd792462e22c510e0e7d516

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Transformation Electromagnetics: An Overview of the Theory and Applications (2010, methodology): “Reflection and time-delay aspects of isotropic cloaking devices based on conformal transfor mations were discussed in [ 26 ].”
On cloaking for elasticity and physical equations with a transformation invariant form (2006, unknown): “In fact such an invariance holds for the non-local bianisotropic electromagnetic equations as follows from a simple extension of an argument of Post [14] (see also Leonhardt and Philbin [41] and Schurig et al [42]).”
An optical cloak made of dielectrics. (2009, background): “Nevertheless, recent theories including transformation optics (TO) and conformal mapping [1-4] proposed that cloaking devices are in principle possible, given the availability of the appropriate medium.”
Optical cloaking with metamaterials (2006, methodology): “properties of the designed metal wire composite cloak with parameters obtained from equations (3) to (8).”
Cloaking via change of variables in electric impedance tomography (2008, background): “Other schemes have also been discussed, including one based on optical conformal mapping [28, 29], another based on anomalous localized resonances [32] and a third based on the use of sensors and active sources [30, 36].”