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Active remote cloaking and optical transformations from a boundary element
perspective
H. H. Zheng, J. J. Xiao, Y. Lai, and C. T. Chan
Department of Physics and William Mong Institute of NanoScience and Technology,
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, China
(Dated: January 3, 2011)
We show that the scheme of exterior cloaking using active sources for the two dimensional
Helmholtz equation [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 073901 (2009)] can be extended to create arbitrary
illusion eects. Using a boundary element approach, we show that active sources can create a silent
domain which can conceal any objects inside and at the same time can make the objects look like
any other object. The sources can be placed in continuous curves that do not encircle the objects
to be cloaked.
PACS numbers: 41.20.Jb, 42.79.-e
The classical wave scattering cross section of an ob-
ject can be signicantly larger than or smaller than
the geometric cross section.
1,2
Recipes to achieve in-
visibility (zero cross section) are particularly intrigu-
ing,
3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
enabled by the concept of transforma-
tion media and articial metamaterials.
6,11,12,13
Invisi-
bility devices based on transformation media typically
encircle the object to be cloaked. It was then proposed
that remote cloaking can be achieved,
14
and the concept
can be extended to create illusions (e.g. change an apple
optically to an banana).
15
These recipes are based on pas-
sive transformation media, and usually have bandwidth
limitations. Active cloaking, using active sources, have
also been proposed.
16
It was recently shown that those
devices can be remote devices,
17
meaning that they do
not need to encircle the object. In this paper, we will
show that we can have a clear understanding of active re-
mote cloaking and a straightforward recipe to determine
the sources if we consider the problem using a boundary
element approach. More interestingly, we show that it
is clear from the boundary element formulation that we
can create illusions (e.g. change an apple optically to an
banana) without bandwidth limitations.
In the quasistatic limit, it is possible to have cloak-
ing eects on polarizable line dipoles that lie outside the
cloaking shell.
18,19
Most recently, external (or remote)
cloaking working at a nite frequency for nite-sized ob-
jects was proposed.
14
These schemes are based on pas-
sive metamaterials. Recently, Miller showed that active
source can be used to make a region of space invisible or
transparent to waves.
16
Vasquez et al.
17
have analytically
constructed active sources to achieve exterior cloaking for
two dimensional (2D) Laplace equation and numerically
demonstrated that multipole point sources have the same
eect for the 2D Helmholtz equation in a broadband fash-
ion.
17,20
In this work, we demonstrate that such active cloaking
eects can be formulated using a 2D boundary integral
equation.
21
In particular, we show numerically that spe-
cic values of elds and their normal gradients on some
curves (labeled as
a
in Fig. 1) will force a certain domain

c
R
2
to be silent with respect to incoming waves
and thus sources that create those elds will render any
object inside invisible. Recently, it was recognized that
illusion eects can be created with properly designed pas-
sive devices that does not encompass the object.
15
Here,
we show that active sources can go beyond remote cloak-
ing and can be used to create illusion eects so that one
object looks like another object. In other words, we are
proposing an active wave-generating device, which when
placed next to arbitrary objects, can make them appear
like another object. Invisibility is a special case in which
the object looks like air. The active sources serve to gen-
erate outgoing elds that mimic those scattered from an-
other object V
i
under the same incoming wave, rendering
an arbitrary object placed inside the silent domain
c
to
appear like the object V
i
for any observers outside some
specic domain
b
that encloses the whole system. A
schematic gure for the conguration is shown in Fig. 1.
The predesigned object V
i
, which is the illusion we want
to create, can be changed on demand as long as we can
compute the scattered elds of this object due to the
incoming probing waves.
The active sources are placed on the red lines which
do not need to enclose the object to be cloaked. These
active sources generate elds that cancels the incoming
waves to create a quiet zone
c
inside which the total
eld is zero so that an arbitrary object (say an apple)
can be concealed, and at the same time outgoing waves
which is exactly those of another object (say a banana)
outside a boundary
b
and thereby creating an illusion.
Observers outside
b
would see a banana, although it is
an apple that is inside
c
. In this approach, the device
does not need to be tailored to the object and illusion, in
contrast to the passive ones,
15
and there is no intrinsic
bandwidth limitation. However, one need to know in
advance the probing wave, or one must set up suciently
fast-responsive sensors to capture the information of the
probing wave on the boundary of
c
.
16
We will formulate and discuss the problem using the
boundary element approach. We note that the surface
integral equation (SIE) of the 2D Helmholtz equation
(
2
+ k
2
)(r) = 0, where k is the wavenumber, can be
2
quite zone
illusion control curve
Active sources
Arbitrary object
cloaked

c
c

b
=
illusion object V
i
FIG. 1: (Color online) Schematic gure for the illusion devices
containing exterior active sources on the boundaries a (red
lines) that would create a cloaked region c which can contain
arbitrary scatter and render the total system response like an
illusion scatter Vi outside the boundary
b
.
written as
21
(r)

r
=

ds

g(s, r)
n
(s) (s)
n
g(s, r)

. (1)
Here n is the outward unit normal vector on the bound-
ary and
n
represents the normal gradient. The 2D SIE
tells us that inside a homogeneous domain , the scalar
wave function (r) is completely determined by the elds
and its normal derivatives on the boundary, connected by
the Greens function g(r, r

). The counterpart of Eq. (1)

for an open domain which might also involve an inci-
dent eld
inc
(r), reads (r)|
r{R
2
}
=
inc
(r)+
bc
(r),
where

bc
(r) =

ds

g(s, r)
n
(s) (s)
n
g(s, r)

. (2)
We note that is a virtual domain, and the material
properties are the same inside and outside the boundary,
hence the fundamental Greens function is the same in
Eq. (1) and Eq. (2). Inspired by Eq. (2), one can con-
struct additional elds (
bc
) in the domain, by appropri-
ately choosing active sources to create (s) and
n
(s)
on the boundary. The issue is that whether it is possi-
ble to use such kind of active sources to construct elds
which can cancel the incident eld
inc
inside the quiet
zone
c
, and simultaneously in the region outside
b
(i.e.,
R
2

b
) mimics the scattering eld, i.e.

bc
(r) =

inc
(r), r
c
,

sc
(r), r R
2

b
,
(3)
such that inside
c
the total eld is zero, while outside

b
the total eld is the superimposition of the incoming
waves and the scattered wave of a pre-designed illusion
object.
The solution can be numerically determined using the
boundary element method (BEM),
21
a method based on
the SIE. BEM approximates the surface integrals by dis-
cretizing the surface into N surface elements

on
which the functions (s) and (s) =
n
(s) are approxi-
mated as constants that represent the value of functions
(s) and (s) across the entire element

, respectively.
In other words, a local step function basis with regard to

is used to expand (s) and (s) over the entire sur-

face , with the expansion coecients denoted as

and

, where = 1, 2, N. From the perspective of

BEM, these expansion coecients can be viewed as 2N
active sources to be determined, and Eq. (3) represents
the conditions to determine these 2N unknowns. Gener-
ally, one can set the restrictions of Eq. (3) at a number
of points inside the two domains listed and then solve a
linear problem to obtain the solution.
There exists a uniqueness theorem
22
which can help to
simplify the condition in Eq. (3). In general situations,
xing the values of on the boundary (Dirichlet bound-
ary condition) can already guarantee a unique solution
in the enclosed domain for the 2D Helmholtz equation.
The constraints in Eq. (3) can be replaced by

bc
(r) =

inc
(r), for r
c
,

sc
(r), for r
b
.
(4)
According to Eq. (4), one can choose N
c
sample points
on
c
and N
b
points on
b
and get a total of N
c
+ N
b
conditions to determine the 2N active sources

and

. For simplicity, let us set N

c
+N
b
= 2N, we can then
establish the following linear equations

H
ca
G
ca
H
ba
G
ba

inc
c

sc
b

, (5)
where H
ba
, G
ba
and H
ca
, G
ca
represent the interacting
matrices relating the source points on
a
to the eld
points on
b
and
c
, and have elements dened as
H

n
g(s, r

)dl , (6)
G

g(s, r

)dl . (7)
Here

a
, r

c

b
and
inc
c
on the right hand
side are the incoming probing wave elds
inc
sampled
at the inner quite zone boundary
c

c
,
sc
b
are the
sampled scattering elds on the outer boundary
b

b
that would have been scattered by the object V
i
under the illumination of the same probing wave
inc
.
Thus, the eld outside
b
(see, for example, the dashed-
line in Fig. 1) is almost the same as (there is numerical
error due to nite sampling) that of
inc
scattered by
the object V
i
. If we set
sc
b
= 0, we achieve the active
external invisible cloaking proposed by Vasquez et al.
17

a
and
a
are both N-dimensional vectors and represent
the total eld and eld gradients on
a
, which require
active sources to generate. We can see that BEM is quite
ecient in calculating the active sources. To determine
the sources explicitly from the elds, we can employ the
inversion procedures suggested by Miller.
16
To make the
idea simple, we will not distinguish between the total
3
(c) (d)
(b) (a)
FIG. 2: (Color online) Two examples of active source external cloak. (a) and (b) show the total elds, (c) and (d) the
scattering elds. The sources are arranged on the boundaries (the white dotted-lines) of three circles in the left panels and
of two crescents for the case depicted in the right panels.
elds on
a
and the the active sources that generate those
elds thereafter.
The example considered by Vasquez et al.
17,20
for re-
mote invisibility cloaking is achieved by simply setting

sc
b
= 0 in Eq. (5). The choice of plane wave exp(ikx)
as the incoming source is just for simplicity. The con-
gurations of the cloaking devices are shown in Fig. 2
for two kinds of source arrangements. Figures 2(a) and
2(b) show the total elds which are generated by the ac-
tive sources [solutions to Eq. (5)] placed on the white
dotted-lines and together with the incoming plane wave.
The total elds (r) outside
b
(marked by the black
dashed-line), a circle of r = 20 units, are the same as the
incident plane waves. At the same time, we achieve a
quiet zone
c
(bounded by
c
as marked by the green
lines) within a circle of r = 2 inside which the total eld
vanishes. Figures 2(c) and 2(d) show the correspond-
ing scattering elds
sc
(r) = (r)
inc
(r), i.e., total
eld minus the incident eld, created by the active de-
vices. Concomitantly,
sc
(r) vanishes outside
b
and is
the reverse of
inc
(r) inside the quiet zone
c
. It is
further shown (gure not presented here) that one single
connected cloaking device can already achieve invisible
cloaking.
Next, we want to demonstrate an illusion eect such
that whatever objects placed inside the quite zone
c
will
appear like another object, chosen here to be a cylinder
with refractive index n = 1.5 and radius r = 10 units.
Figures 3(a) and 3(b) show the scattered and total eld
of such a cylindrical scatterer (yellow circle) under the il-
lumination of a plane wave exp(ikx). We rst arbitrarily
choose the control boundary
b
(marked as the dashed-
line) as a circle with radius r = 20 outside which the
illusion shall be observed. This requires one to set
sc
b
in Eq. (5) as the scattering elds due to a cylinder of
r = 10 [see Fig. 3(a)] on
b
. A total of N = 900 sample
points are used here in the numerical calculation, and

inc
c
in Eq. (5) is the function exp(ikx) sampled over a
circle r = 2 (the boundary of the quiet zone
c
marked
by the green solid circle). By comparing the upper pan-
els and the lower panels, it is clearly seen that the total
system responses to the incoming plane wave [Fig. 3(d)]
in a way as the r = 10 cylinder does [Fig. 3(b)]. We
note that we can put any non-radiating object inside
c
without aecting the total scattering pattern outside
b
[see Fig. 3(c)]. We stress that we do not care what ob-
ject is inside
c
, since all the eld inside
c
is zero as is
shown in Fig. 3(d), and any added passive object inside
would not aect the total elds in any other parts of the
system. For example, we can put an apple inside
c
, and
4

FIG. 3: (Color online) Optical illusion eect by active sources. Panels (a) and (c) show the scattering elds, (b) and (d)
the total elds. The upper panels are for a dielectric cylinder with r = 10. The lower panels are for an illusion device, which
comprises of sources on the boundaries of three circles, which gives the same scattering eect as the cylindrical scatter outside
the dotted lines. Any object concealed inside the quite zone will appear as if it is a dielectric cylinder with r = 20 if an observer
is sitting outside the dotted circle.
it will look like a dielectric cylinder to any observer out-
side
b
. We can choose to change the sources so that the
outside observer see whatever we want them to see. Any
passive object inside
c
does not to talk to the other
parts, rendering this illusion device workable for multiple
and arbitrary objects. Figure 3(c) shows the scattering
elds without any object in
c
. In such case the scat-
tered elds are just the negative of the incoming plane
wave, as expected.
In conclusion, we used a boundary element method
to demonstrate both cloaking and illusion eects for the
2D Helmholtz equation using active sources to generate
elds on boundaries that do not encircle the object to
be cloaked. The scalar wave formalism applies both to
acoustic waves and EM waves in 2D. It works for arbi-
trary objects and there is no intrinsic bandwidth limita-
tion. Experimental demonstration for an arbitrary time-
varying source would depend on the availability of sensors
that can detect the elds quick enough on the boundaries
and to respond fast enough.
16
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Hong Kong RGC Grant
No. 600209. Computation resources are supported by
Shun Hing Education and Charity Fund. We acknowl-
edge discussions with Z. H. Hang and Jeery Lee.
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