Experimental Realization of a Superdispersion-Enabled Ultrabroadband Terahertz Cloak

Invisibility has been a topic of long-standing interest owing to the advent of metamaterials and transformation optics, but still faces open challenges after its tremendous development in recent decades. One of the big challenges is the narrow bandwidth, as the realization of an invisibility cloak is usually based on a metamaterial-an artificial composite material composed of subwavelength resonator structures that are always associated with dispersion. Different from previous works that have tried to eliminate the material dispersion to enhance the bandwidth of an invisibility cloak, here, it is found that by judiciously harnessing the material dispersion, the bandwidth of the cloak can still be significantly increased. Interestingly, the material dispersion does not violate the law of causality. As a proof of concept, an ultrabroadband terahertz (THz) carpet cloak is experimentally demonstrated through an array of superdispersive microparticles, rendering the target object invisible to detection by both time- and frequency-domain wideband systems. The work presents a feasible invisibility strategy that is closer to practical applications and may pave a brand-new way for the development of dispersion-dominated ultrabroadband metadevices.

Automated summary

Researchers have successfully developed an ultrabroadband invisibility cloak by harnessing the characteristics of material dispersion. This study provides a new approach for the development of dispersion-dominated ultrabroadband devices.