Abstract
Impressive progresses have been achieved in the field of metamaterial to mimic the illusion or camouflage effects in nature. These include invisible cloaks and many other cloak-based illusion meta-devices. However, to date many experiments only present single, static or discretized functionalities. The dynamical control of multiple kinds of illusion signals can only be achieved by embedding complex active sources directly connected to external stimuli, leading to limited on/off switching effect in a contact fashion. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a distinct scheme to incorporate multi-functions into one passive Laplacian DC meta-device, assisted by light illumination. It is shown that light-programmable cloaking, full illusion, and partial illusion can be achieved on the same device without physical contact of the heating pads or electric bias, at the cost of only four kinds of natural bulk materials with homogeneous parameters throughout. A DC network is fabricated to demonstrate the proof of concept, with measurement results in good agreement with the numerical simulations. The proposed scheme may open a new avenue to the non-contact multiphysical control of multi-illusion functions for Laplacian fields.
Highlights
In nature, many creatures have mastered the skill of rendering their appearances, for various purposes from camouflage to courtship
Compared with traditional practices for transformation optics (TO) devices which requires a large number of elements and gives up theoretical exactness based on effective-medium approximation (EMA)[21,22,23], our device consists of eight components that are homogeneous without any singularity or approximation
The results are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations, and show a multifunction of cloak, full illusion, and partial illusion that is tunable through light illumination
Summary
Many creatures have mastered the skill of rendering their appearances, for various purposes from camouflage to courtship. Great efforts have been made to realize the analogue of illusion effects in artificial metamaterials or meta-devices, resulting in the prominent achievements of invisible cloaks[1,2,3] and many other cloak-based illusion devices[4,5,6]. The current illusion meta-devices are still far from being able to fully imitate the performances in nature. One of their most significant limitations is that these meta-devices cannot adjust its illusion signals based on different circumstances, which is an essential function of many animals. Controlled by its nervous system, the color pattern and texture of its skin is changed to match this environment through cells such as chromophores, thereby sending out illusive signals. Our work implies an efficient approach towards the remote control of illusion meta-device that is readily applicable to all kinds of Laplacian fields, including DC magnetic field[24,25,26,27] and thermal field[28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35]
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