Towards omnidirectional, large scale, full polarization, and broadband practical invisibility cloaks: Challenges and progress

Abstract

Invisibility cloaks have experienced a tremendous development in the past few years, but the current technologies to convert the cloaks into practical applications are still facing numerous bottlenecks. In this paper, we provide the review of the challenges and recent progress in the invisibility cloaks from a practical perspective. In particular, the following key challenges such as non-extreme parameters, homogeneity, omnidirectivity, full polarization, large scale and broad band are addressed. We analyze the physical mechanisms behind the challenges and consequently evaluate the merits and defects of the recent solutions. We anticipate some compromises on the ideal cloaks are required in order to achieve practical invisibility cloaks in the future.