Elastodynamic cloaking and field enhancement for soft spheres

Abstract: In this paper, we bring to the awareness of the scientific community and civil engineers, an important fact: the possible lack of wave protection of transformational elastic cloaks. To do so, we propose spherical cloaks described by a non-singular asymmetric elasticity tensor depending upon a small parameter $\eta,$ that defines the softness of a region one would like to conceal from elastodynamic waves. By varying $\eta$, we generate a class of soft spheres dressed by elastodynamic cloaks, which are shown to considerably reduce the soft spheres' scattering. Importantly, such cloaks also provide some wave protection except for a countable set of frequencies, for which some large elastic field enhancement (resonance peaks) can be observed within the cloaked soft spheres, hence entailing a possible lack of wave protection. We further present an investigation of trapped modes in elasticity via which we supply a good approximation of such Mie-type resonances by some transcendental equation. Next, after a detailed presentation of spherical elastodynamic PML of Cosserat type, we introduce a novel generation of cloaks, the mixed cloaks, as a solution to the lack of wave protection in elastodynamic cloaking. Indeed, mixed cloaks achieve both invisibility cloaking and protection throughout a large range of frequencies. We think, mixed cloaks will soon be generalized to other areas of physics and engineering and will in particular foster studies in experiments.