Cloaking a sensor for three-dimensional Maxwell's equations: transformation optics approach

The ideal transformation optics cloaking is accompanied by shielding: external observations do not provide any indication of the presence of a cloaked object, nor is any information about the fields outside detectable inside the cloaked region. In this paper, a transformation is proposed to cloak three-dimensional objects for electromagnetic waves in sensor mode, i.e., cloaking accompanied by degraded shielding. The proposed transformation tackles the difficulty caused by the fact that the lowest multipole in three-dimensional electromagnetic radiation is dipole rather than monopole. The loss of the surface impedance of the sensor plays an important role in determining the cloaking modes: ideal cloaking, sensor cloaking and resonance. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America