Inverse Design of Invisibility Cloaks using the Optical Theorem

We develop and apply an optimization method to design invisibility cloaks. Our method is based on minimizing the forward scattering amplitude of the cloaked object, which by the optical theorem, is equivalent to the total cross section. The use of the optical theorem circumvents the need to evaluate and integrate the scattering amplitude over angle at each iteration, and thus provides a simpler, more computationally efficient objective function for optimizing structures. We implement the approach using gradient descent optimization and present several gradient-permittivity cloaks that reduce scatter by metallic targets of different size and shape.