Enhancement of non-resonant dielectric cloaks using anisotropic composites

Cloaking techniques conceal objects by controlling the flow of electromagnetic waves to minimize scattering. Herein, the effectiveness of homogenized anisotropic materials in non-resonant dielectric multilayer cloaking is studied. Because existing multilayer cloaking by isotropic materials can be regarded as homogenous anisotropic cloaking from a macroscopic view, anisotropic materials can be efficiently designed through optimization of their physical properties. Anisotropic properties can be realized in two-phase composites if the physical properties of the material are within appropriate bounds. The optimized anisotropic physical properties are identified by a numerical optimization technique based on a full-wave simulation using the finite element method. The cloaking performance measured by the total scattering width is improved by about 2.8% and 25% in eight- and three-layer cylindrical cloaking materials, respectively, compared with multilayer cloaking by isotropic materials. In all cloaking examples, the optimized microstructures of the two-phase composites are identified as the simple lamination of two materials, which maximizes the anisotropy. The same performance as published for eight-layer cloaking by isotropic materials is achieved by three-layer cloaking using the anisotropic material. Cloaking with an approximately 50% reduction of total scattering width is achieved even in an octagonal object. Since the cloaking effect can be realized using just a few layers of the laminated anisotropic dielectric composite, this may have an advantage in the mass production of cloaking devices.