Abstract
Optical cloaking has been one of unattainable dreams and just a subject in fiction until recently. Several different approaches to cloaking have been proposed and demonstrated: stealth technology, active camouflage and transformation optics. The last one would be the most formal approach modifying electromagnetic field around an object to be cloaked with metamaterials. While cloaking based on transformation optics, though valid only at single frequency, is experimentally demonstrated in microwave region, its operation in visible spectrum is still distant from realisation mainly owing to difficulty in fabricating metamaterial structure whose elements are much smaller than wavelength of light. Here we show that achromatic optical cloaking in visible spectrum is possible with the mere principle based on geometrical optics. In combining a pair of polarising beam splitters and right-angled prisms, rays of light to be obstructed by an object can make a detour to an observer, while unobstructed rays go straight through two polarising beam splitters. What is observed eventually through the device is simply background image as if nothing exists in between.
Highlights
History of invisibility cloaking in real world is not old
The first technological achievement of a sort of cloaking would perhaps be stealth technology which enables fighter jets to be undetected by enemy radars [1, 2]
The second technological achievement, which operates with visible light, have emerged in totally different environment from the former
Summary
History of invisibility cloaking in real world is not old. The first technological achievement of a sort of cloaking would perhaps be stealth technology which enables fighter jets to be undetected by enemy radars [1, 2]. The second technological achievement, which operates with visible light, have emerged in totally different environment from the former. The most formal and rigorous approach to invisibility cloaking is transformation optics with metamaterials: manipulating material constants of a surrounding medium of an object, so that incident electromagnetic wave upon the object emerges as if nothing exists. The fourth approach to cloaking based upon totally new concept has been recently proposed by some of us [12]. It does requires neither nanostructures nor sophisticated information technology, but some of the most basic optics, i.e. mirrors and 1:1 polarising beamsplitters which can be found in any optics laboratory around the world
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