Perfect transmission invisibility for waveguides with sound hard walls

We are interested in a time harmonic acoustic problem in a waveguide with locally perturbed sound hard walls. We consider a setting where an observer generates incident plane waves at $-\infty$ and probes the resulting scattered field at $-\infty$ and $+\infty$. Practically, this is equivalent to measure the reflection and transmission coefficients respectively denoted $R$ and $T$. In [9], a technique has been proposed to construct waveguides with smooth walls such that $R=0$ and $|T|=1$ (non reflection). However the approach fails to ensure $T=1$ (perfect transmission without phase shift). In this work, first we establish a result explaining this observation. More precisely, we prove that for wavenumbers smaller than a given bound $k_{\star}$ depending on the geometry, we cannot have $T=1$ so that the observer can detect the presence of the defect if he/she is able to measure the phase at $+\infty$. In particular, if the perturbation is smooth and small (in amplitude and in width), $k_{\star}$ is very close to the threshold wavenumber. Then, in a second step, we change the point of view and, for a given wavenumber, working with singular perturbations of the domain, we show how to obtain $T=1$. In this case, the scattered field is exponentially decaying both at $-\infty$ and $+\infty$. We implement numerically the method to provide examples of such undetectable defects.