An ultrathin invisibility skin cloak for visible light
Wrap-around invisibility cloak
An invisibility cloak can be used to conceal an object from view by guiding light around it. Most cloaks developed so far have bulky structures that are difficult to scale up for hiding large objects. To design a thin invisibility cloak that can be wrapped around an object such as a sheet or skin, Ni et al. designed a two-dimensional metamaterial surface. Such flexible, highly reflective materials could be manufactured at large scale to hide large objects.
Science, this issue p. 1310
Abstract
Metamaterial-based optical cloaks have thus far used volumetric distribution of the material properties to gradually bend light and thereby obscure the cloaked region. Hence, they are bulky and hard to scale up and, more critically, typical carpet cloaks introduce unnecessary phase shifts in the reflected light, making the cloaks detectable. Here, we demonstrate experimentally an ultrathin invisibility skin cloak wrapped over an object. This skin cloak conceals a three-dimensional arbitrarily shaped object by complete restoration of the phase of the reflected light at 730-nanometer wavelength. The skin cloak comprises a metasurface with distributed phase shifts rerouting light and rendering the object invisible. In contrast to bulky cloaks with volumetric index variation, our device is only 80 nanometer (about one-ninth of the wavelength) thick and potentially scalable for hiding macroscopic objects.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S5
Reference (46)
Resources
File (ni.sm.pdf)
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Science
Volume 349 • Issue 6254 • 18 September 2015
Pages: 1310 - 1314
History
Received: 1 July 2015
Accepted: 17 August 2015
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
