dc Electric Invisibility Cloak

Abstract

We present the first experimental demonstration of a dc electric cloak for steady current fields. Using the analogy between electrically conducting materials and resistor networks, a dc invisibility cloak is designed, fabricated, and tested using the circuit theory. We show that the dc cloak can guide electric currents around the cloaked region smoothly and keep perturbations only inside the cloak. Outside the cloak, the current lines return to their original directions as if nothing happens. The measurement data agree exceptionally well with the theoretical prediction and simulation result, with nearly perfect cloaking performance. The proposed method can be directly used to realize other dc electric devices with anisotropic conductivities designed by the transformation optics. Manipulation of steady currents with the control of anisotropic conductivities has a lot of potential applications, such as electric impedance tomography, graphene, natural resource exploration, and military camouflage.