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We demonstrate that a planar and ultrathin binary lens can focus an azimuthally polarized beam with vortical phase (APV) to a subwavelength spot of transverse polarization. The results elaborates that, in the multi-layer medium, this focused spot, which is beyond the Rayleigh diffraction limitation, can be well maintained for several wavelengths after travelling through the dielectric interfaces, which is not attainable by using other vector beams (i.e., radially, linearly and circularly polarized beams) as the illuminating light. This compact optical system can be valuable in data writing and defect identification of wafer or silicon chips, owing to the enhanced polarized focusing through interfaces. It also enables to be highly integrated with traditional microscopy for the far-field super-resolution imaging, surface scanning and detection, and subwavelength focusing, owing to the enhanced focusing performance (reduced width and extended length) as well as the planarized configuration of the ultrathin lens., Comment: 8 pages,4 figures

The principle of transformation optics has been applied to various wave phenomena (e.g., optics, electromagnetics, acoustics and thermodynamics). Recently, metamaterial devices manipulating dc currents have received increasing attention which usually adopted the analogue of transformation optics using complicated resistor networks to mimic the inhomogeneous and anisotropic conductivities. We propose a distinct and general principle of manipulating dc currents by directly solving electric conduction equations, which only needs to utilize two layers of bulk natural materials. We experimentally demonstrate dc bilayer cloak and fan-shaped concentrator, derived from the generalized account for cloaking sensor. The proposed schemes have been validated as exact devices and this opens a facile way towards complete spatial control of dc currents. The proposed schemes may have vast potentials in various applications not only in dc, but also in other fields of manipulating magnetic field, thermal heat, elastic mechanics, and matter waves.

Using the phenomenon of extraordinary sound transmission (EST) through artificially constructed density-near-zero (DNZ) materials, we propose an alternative approach to realize a very robust acoustic cloaking, which includes one absorber and one projector connected by an energy channel. The elementary unit cell is made of one single-piece homogeneous copper, but it well maintains both the original planar wavefront and the nearly perfect one-dimensional transmission, in the presence of any inserted objects. Furthermore, the overall cloaked space can be increased, designed, and distributed by arbitrarily assembling additional DNZ cells without any upper limit in the total cloaking volume. We demonstrate acoustic cloaking by different combinations of DNZ cells in free space as well as in acoustic waveguides, which enables any objects inside the cells imperceptible along undistorted sound paths.

We theoretically and experimentally demonstrate the focusing of macroscopic 3D darkness surrounded by all light in free space. The object staying in the darkness is similar to staying in an empty light capsule because light just bypasses it by resorting to destructive interference. Its functionality of controlling the direction of energy flux of light macroscopically is fascinating, similar in some sense to the transformation-based cloaking effect. Binary-optical system exhibiting anti-resolution (AR) is designed and fabricated, by which electromagnetic energy flux avoids and bends smoothly around a nearly perfect darkness region. AR remains an unexplored topic hitherto, in contrast to the super-resolution for realizing high spatial resolution. This novel scheme replies on smearing out the PSF and thus poses less stringent limitations upon the object's size and position since the created dark (zero-field) area reach 8 orders of magnitude larger than the square of wavelength in size. It functions very well at arbitrarily polarized beams in three dimensions, which is also frequency-scalable in the whole electromagnetic spectrum., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

Invisibility has attracted intensive research in various communities, e.g., optics, electromagnetics, acoustics, thermodynamics, etc. However, the most of them have only been experimentally achieved by virtue of simplified approaches due to their inhomogeneous and extreme parameters imposed by transformation-optic method, and usually require challenging realization with metamaterials. In this paper, we demonstrate an advanced bilayer thermal cloak with naturally available materials first time. This scheme, directly from thermal conduction equation, has been validated as an exact cloak rather than a reduced one, and we experimentally confirmed its perfect performance (heat-front maintenance and heat protection) in an actual setup. The proposed scheme may open a new avenue to control the diffusive heat flow in ways inconceivable with phonons.

We manipulate optical Tamm states in graphene-based photonics to achieve and steer large magneto-optical effects. Here we report the presence of a giant Faraday rotation via a single graphene layer of atomic thickness while keeping a high transmission. The Faraday rotation is enhanced across the interface between two photonic crystals due to the presence of an interface mode, which presents a strong electromagnetic field confinement at the location of the graphene sheet. Our proposed scheme opens a promising avenue to realize high performance graphene magneto-optical devices that can be extended to other two-dimensional structures., Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures

Invisible cloak has long captivated the popular conjecture and attracted intensive research in various communities of wave dynamics, e.g., optics, electromagnetics, acoustics, etc. However, their inhomogeneous and extreme parameters imposed by transformation-optic method will usually require challenging realization with metamaterials, resulting in narrow bandwidth, loss, polarization-dependence, etc. On the contrary, we demonstrate that tunable thermodynamic cloak can be achieved with homogeneous and finite conductivity only employing naturally available materials. The controlled localization of thermal distribution inside the coating layer has been presented, and it shows that an incomplete cloak can function perfectly. Practical realization of such homogeneous thermal cloak has been suggested by using two naturally occurring conductive materials, which provides an unprecedentedly plausible way to flexibly realize flexible thermal cloak and manipulate thermal flow., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures

The creation of wave-dynamic illusion functionality is of great interests to various scientific communities, which can potentially transform an actual perception into the pre-controlled perception, thus empowering unprecedented applications in the advanced-material science, camouflage, cloaking, optical and/or microwave cognition, and defense security, etc. By using the space transformation theory and engineering capability of metamaterials, we propose and realize a functional ghost illusion device, which is capable of creating wave-dynamic virtual ghost images off the original object's position under the illumination of electromagnetic waves. The scattering signature of the object is thus ghosted and perceived as multiple ghost targets with different geometries and compositions. The ghost-illusion material, being inhomogeneous and anisotropic, was realized by thousands of varying unit cells working at non-resonance. The experimental demonstration of the ghost illusion validates our theory of scattering metamorphosis and opens a novel avenue to the wave-dynamic illusion, cognitive deception, manipulate strange light or matter behaviors, and design novel optical and microwave devices., Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures

Optical wavefront can be manipulated by interfering elementary beams with phase inhomogeneity. Therefore a surface allowing huge, abrupt and position-variant phase change would enable all possibilities of wavefront engineering. However, one may not have the luxury of efficient abrupt-phase-changing materials in acoustics. This motivates us to establish a counterpart mechanism for acoustics, in order to empower the wide spectrum of novel acoustic applications. Remarkably, the proposed impedance-governed generalized Snell's law (IGSL) of reflection is distinguished from that in optics. Via the manipulation of inhomogeneous acoustic impedance, extraordinary reflection can be tailored for unprecedented wavefront manipulation while ordinary reflection can be surprisingly switched on or off. Our results may power the acoustic-wave manipulation and engineering. We demonstrate novel acoustic applications by planar surfaces designed with IGSL., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

We show that cloaking of isolated objects is subject to a diameter-bandwidth product limitation: as the size of the object increases, the bandwidth of good (small cross-section) cloaking decreases inversely with the diameter, as a consequence of causality constraints even for perfect fabrication and materials with negligible absorption. This generalizes a previous result that perfect cloaking of isolated objects over a nonzero bandwidth violates causality. Furthermore, we demonstrate broader causality-based scaling limitations on any bandwidth-averaged cloaking cross-section, using complex analysis and the optical theorem to transform the frequency-averaged problem into a single scattering problem with transformed materials., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

An optical Fano resonance, which is caused by birefringence control rather than frequency selection, is discovered. Such birefringence-induced Fano resonance comes with fast-switching radiation. The resonance condition $\varepsilon_t< 1/\varepsilon_r$ is revealed and a tiny perturbation in birefringence is found to result in a giant switch in the principal light pole induced near surface plasmon resonance. The loss and size effects upon the Fano resonance have been studied Fano resonance is still pronounced, even if the loss and size of the object increase. The evolutions of the radiation patterns and energy singularities illustrate clearly the sensitive dependence of Fano resonance upon the birefringence.

Phase-preserved optical elevator is an optical device to lift up an entire plane virtually without distortion in light path or phase. Using transformation optics, we have predicted and observed the realization of such a broadband phase-preserved optical elevator, made of a natural homogeneous birefringent crystal without resorting to absorptive and narrowband metamaterials involving time-consuming nano-fabrication. In our demonstration, the optical elevator is designed to lift a sheet upwards, and the phase is verified to be preserved always. The camouflage capability is also demonstrated in the presence of adjacent objects of the same scale at will. The elevating device functions in different surrounding media over the wavelength range of 400-700 nm. Our work opens up prospects for studies of light trapping, solar energy, illusion optics, communication, and imaging.

We propose an birefringence route to perfect electromagnetic (EM) wave tunneling through a metallic film which relies on homogeneous birefringent coatings with moderate and positive parameters only. EM transparency is achieved in such an birefringent-metal-birefringent (BMB) structure for both polarizations and over nearly all incident angles. The stringent restrictions in conventional dielectric-metal-dielectric media, i.e., dielectrics with extremely negative permittivity, high magnetic field and polarization dependence (only for TE waves), are not required in our method. The criterion for perfect transmission is obtained by analyzing the effective medium theory and EM fields of such a birefringent structure. The solutions hold for lossless and lossy cases in a quite large frequency range., Comment: 9 pages

Usually a light beam pushes a particle when the photons act upon it. This is due to that the electric-dipole particle in the paraxial beam is considered. We investigate the scattering forces in non-paraxial gradientless beams and find that the forces can drag certain particles towards the beam source. The major criterion to be carried out to get the attractive force is the strong non-paraxiality of the light beam. The cone angle denoting the non-paraxiality has been investigated to unveil its importance on achieving dragging force. We hope the attractive forces will be very useful in nanoparticle manipulation., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures

We propose an analytical scattering theory in spectral domain to model the electromagnetic (EM) fields of a gyrotropic sphere in terms of the eigen-functions and their associated spectral eigenvalues/coefficients in a recursive integral form. Applying the continuous boundary conditions of electromagnetic fields on the surface between the free space and gyrotropic sphere, the spectral coefficients of transmitted fields inside the gyrotropic sphere and the scattered fields in the isotropic host medium can be obtained exactly by expanding spherical vector wave eigenfunctions. Numerical results are provided for some representative cases, which are compared to the results from adaptive integral method (AIM). Good agreement demonstrates the validity of the proposed analytical scattering theory for gyrotropic spheres in spectral domain using Fourier transform., Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures

An inverse way to define the parameters of ideal cylindrical cloaks is developed, in which the interconnection between the parameters is revealed for the first time without knowing a specific coordinate transformation. The required parameters are derived in terms of the integral form of cloaking generators, which is very general and allows us to examine the significance of the parametric profiles. The validity of such inverse way and the invisibility characteristics are presented in full-wave numerical simulation of plane wave scattering by cloaked cylinders., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure

Based on the concept of the cloak generating function, we propose a numerical method to compute the invisibility performance of various quadratic spherical cloaks and obtain optimal invisibility results. A non-ideal discrete model is used to calculate and optimize the total scattering cross-sections of different profiles of the generating function. A bell-shaped quadratic spherical cloak is found to be the best candidate, which is further optimized by controlling design parameters involved. Such improved invisibility is steady even when the model is highly discretized., Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures

An analytical method of electromagnetic wave interactions with a general radially anisotropic cloak is established. It is able to deal with arbitrary parameters ($\epsilon_r(r)$, $\mu_r(r)$, $\epsilon_t(r)$ and $\mu_t(r)$) of a radially anisotropic inhomogeneous shell. The general cloaking condition is proposed from the wave relations for the first time. We derive the parameters of a novel class of spherical nonlinear cloaks and examine its invisibility performance by the proposed method at various nonlinear situations. Spherical metamaterial cloaks with improved invisibility performance is achieved with optimal nonlinearity in transformation and core-shell ratio., Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures

Two novel classes of spherical invisibility cloaks based on nonlinear transformation have been studied. The cloaking characteristics are presented by segmenting the nonlinear transformation based spherical cloak into concentric isotropic homogeneous coatings. Detailed investigations of the optimal discretization (e.g., thickness control of each layer, nonlinear factor, etc.) are presented for both linear and nonlinear spherical cloaks and their effects on invisibility performance are also discussed. The cloaking properties and our choice of optimal segmentation are verified by the numerical simulation of not only near-field electric-field distribution but also the far-field radar cross section (RCS)., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures

In this paper, we establish the full-wave electromagnetic scattering theory to study the electromagnetic scattering from infinitely long cylinders with radially anisotropic coatings. We show that the total effective scattering width can be dramatically reduced by the suitable adjustment of the dielectric anisotropy of the shell, while it is not the case for tuning the dielectric anisotropy of the core. Furthermore, we could make the cylindrical objects invisible when both dielectric and magnetic anisotropies are adjusted. In the long wavelength limit, we develop effective medium theory to derive the effective isotropic permittivity and permeability for the anisotropic coated cylinders, and the invisibility radius ratio derived from the full-wave theory for small coated cylinders can be well described within the effective medium theory., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

We studied a metasurface constituted as a periodic array of semiconductor split-ring resonators. The resonance frequencies of the metasurface excited by normally incident light were found to be continuously tunable in the terahertz regime through an external magnetostatic field of suitable orientation. As such metasurfaces can be assembled into 3D metamaterials, the foregoing conclusion also applies to metamaterials comprising semiconductor split-ring resonators., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures