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10 - Cloaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

By
Christopher C. Davis  and
Igor I. Smolyaninov
Edited by
Alexei A. Maradudin
Christopher C. Davis
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Igor I. Smolyaninov
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Alexei A. Maradudin
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Summary

Introduction, general background, and history

Cloaking is the ability to make a region of space, and everything in it, invisible to an external observer. It has been the dream of fantasy writers for decades. In 2009, John Mullan [1] of The Guardian newspaper summarized the ten most important works that use the theme: The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, The Republic by Plato, The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling, Theogony by Hesiod, Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis, The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. A true cloak allows the clear observation of the space behind the cloaked region, and the cloaked region casts no shadow and produces no wavefront changes in the light that has passed through the cloaked region. It is not possible to build a perfect invisibility cloak, as was perceptively observed in the Star Trek series in which cloaked Romulan and Klingon spaceships could be detected by the subtle disturbances of space that the cloak produced.

Interest in making real cloaking devices can be traced to two seminal articles, one by John Pendry and his co-workers [2], and the other by Ulf Leonhardt [3]. Their approach can be called the transformational optics approach to cloaking, which will be discussed in more detail later.

Type
Chapter
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Structured Surfaces as Optical Metamaterials , pp. 316 - 385
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • Cloaking
  • Edited by Alexei A. Maradudin, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Structured Surfaces as Optical Metamaterials
  • Online publication: 01 June 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921261.011
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  • Cloaking
  • Edited by Alexei A. Maradudin, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Structured Surfaces as Optical Metamaterials
  • Online publication: 01 June 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921261.011
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  • Cloaking
  • Edited by Alexei A. Maradudin, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Structured Surfaces as Optical Metamaterials
  • Online publication: 01 June 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921261.011
Available formats
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