Discontinuous electromagnetic fields using orthogonal electric and magnetic currents for wavefront Manipulation

We introduce the idea of discontinuous electric and magnetic fields at a boundary to design and shape wavefronts in an arbitrary manner. To create this discontinuity in the field we use orthogonal electric and magnetic currents which act like Huygens source to radiate the desired wavefront. These currents can be synthesized either by an array of electric and magnetic dipoles or by a combined impedance and admittance surface. A dipole array is an active implementation to impose discontinuous fields while the impedance/admittance surface acts as a passive one. We then expand on our previous work showing how electric and magnetic dipole arrays can be used to cloak an object demonstrating novel cloaking and anti-cloaking schemes. We also show how to arbitrarily refract a beam using a set of impedance and admittance surfaces. Refraction using the idea of discontinuous fields is shown to be a more general case of refraction than using simple phase discontinuities. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America