We “see” a physical object by detecting electromagnetic waves scattered from the object. A device that can “correct” or cancel that scattering would take the notion of a magic invisibility cloak from the realm of science fiction to reality. In fact, such physical devices already exist, accomplishing their feat based on metamaterials that bend light around the object to be cloaked, “correcting” the scattering. Designing metamaterials with the right light-bending properties for this purpose is, however, quite challenging, and the designs often require a thick “cloak.” An alternative approach to this problem is “active cloaking”: surrounding the object to be cloaked with electromagnetic sources that are carefully tuned to cancel the electromagnetic field scattered by the object. In this work, we demonstrate the first experimental realization of such a thin active cloak for microwaves.

The sources we have used are specially designed antennas and phase shifters, which can be configured into thin layers with flexibility in shape. We have succeeded in cloaking a sizable metallic cylinder by properly tuning the phase of the radiation from the antennas so that the radiation cancels the field scattered by the cylinder. We have gone a step further than cloaking and have also demonstrated how the object can be disguised as another object by tuning the antennas in a controlled way. The catch with active cloaking, however, is that knowledge of the incident field is required to tune the antennas. To tackle this issue, we have discussed some potential solutions that also utilize the antennas as sensors to detect the incident field.

Future work along this line will aim to extend the bandwidth of the cloak (with respect to pulsed incident fields) as well as design active cloaks that can adaptively respond to an incident field.