Abstract
We present the design of an invisible metamaterial fibre operating at optical frequencies, which could be fabricated by adapting existing fibre drawing techniques. The invisibility is realised by matching the refractive index of the metamaterial fibre with the surroundings. We present a general recipe for the fabrication of such fibres, and numerically characterise a specific example using hexagonally arranged silver nanowires in a silica background. We find that invisibility is highly sensitive to details of the metamaterial boundary, a problem that is likely to affect most invisibility and cloaking schemes.
Highlights
Electromagnetic invisibility, i.e. the passing of light through a structure without scattering, distortion, or absorption, is currently of great interest, due to its fascinating implications
We have designed and characterised a metamaterial fibre which exhibits a strong reduction in scattering cross section compared to metal and dielectric cylinders of equivalent size
Our device operates optimally at the designed wavelength under TE polarisation and normal incidence, yet excellent performance is maintained for ~10nm of bandwidth, or within a ± 10° variation in incident angle with respect to normal incidence, where a reduction in shadow of more than 95% is maintained
Summary
Electromagnetic invisibility, i.e. the passing of light through a structure without scattering, distortion, or absorption, is currently of great interest, due to its fascinating implications. We propose a much simpler approach: optical transparency is achieved by designing a metamaterial with refractive index that matches the surroundings, consisting of an array of sub-wavelength metallic nanocylinders surrounded by a dielectric Such structures could potentially be fabricated via metamaterial fibre drawing, either via direct co-drawing, in which a macroscopically sized metal-dielectric preform is heated and reduced in size by several orders of magnitude [14,15], or via pumping liquid metal into existing micro- and nano- structured holey photonic crystal fibres (PCFs) [16]. It has been shown that important functionality can potentially be realised with such fibrebased metamaterials, such as low-loss mid-IR waveguiding [20], sub-wavelength waveguiding [21] and hyperlensing [22] We propose another interesting structure that can be fabricated via drawing of metal cylinders in a dielectric – the optically invisible fibre. At larger fibre diameters our invisible metamaterial becomes a near-perfect absorber, due its low reflectance and inherently lossy nature
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