Employing pre-stress to generate finite cloaks for antiplane elastic waves

It is shown that nonlinear elastic pre-stress of neo-Hookean hyperelastic materials can be used as a mechanism to generate finite cloaks and thus render objects near-invisible to incoming antiplane elastic waves. This approach appears to negate the requirement for special cloaking metamaterials with inhomogeneous and anisotropic material properties in this case. These properties are induced naturally by virtue of the pre-stress. This appears to provide a mechanism for broadband cloaking since dispersive effects due to metamaterial microstructure will not arise. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4704566]