Diffusive-light invisibility cloak for transient illumination

Abstract

Invisibility in a diffusive-light-scattering medium has been recently demonstrated by employing a scattering-cancellation core-shell cloak. Unlike nondiffusive cloaks, such a device can be simultaneously macroscopic, broadband, passive, polarization independent, and omnidirectional. Unfortunately, it has been verified that this cloak, as well as more sophisticated ones based on transformation optics, fail under pulsed illumination, invalidating their use for a variety of applications. Here, we introduce a different approach based on unimodular transformations that enables the construction of unidirectional diffusive-light cloaks exhibiting a perfect invisibility effect, even under transient conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate that a polygonal cloak can extend this functionality to multiple directions with a nearly ideal behavior, while preserving all other features. We propose and numerically verify a simple cloak realization based on a layered stack of two isotropic materials. The studied devices have several applications not addressable by any of the other cloaks proposed to date, including shielding from pulse-based detection techniques, cloaking undesired scattering elements in time-of-flight imaging or high-speed communication systems for diffusive environments, and building extreme optical security features. The discussed cloaking strategy could also be applied to simplify the implementation of thermal cloaks.