Plasmonic and metamaterial cloaking:: physical mechanisms and potentials

Artificial materials, metamaterials and plasmonic media have recently received tremendous attention from the scientific communities, media and the general public, following novel ideas and suggestions for their potential use in a variety of applications such as cloaking. Here we briefly review and highlight some of the available solutions for invisibility and cloaking that employ metamaterials and plasmonic materials at various frequencies. We briefly overview some of the different cloaking mechanisms recently proposed in the literature, such as plasmonic cloaking based on scattering cancelation, coordinate-transformation cloaking and anomalous localized resonances for cloaking, in particular providing some details for scattering-cancelation-based plasmonic cloaking. We mention the main analogies and differences among these various approaches and we discuss some possible ideas for realizations and applications of these results, with particular attention to the physical phenomena involved.