Active Cloaking

Abstract: Electromagnetic cloaking refers to the ability to prevent an object from scattering an incident electromagnetic field. This has been accomplished in recent works by routing the incident field around the object or by changing the scattering properties of the object itself through specially designed materials, surfaces or guiding structures. In this letter, we introduce a new way of cancelling the electromagnetic scattering of an object by using an array of sources. We show that by superimposing magnetic and electric surface current densities at the boundary of an object, the scattered fields from that object can be cancelled. These magnetic and electric surface currents can be discretized into electric and magnetic dipoles which are physically implementable by straight and loop wire antennas. Finally we confirm our results using numerical simulations for cloaking a dielectric and a metallic cylinder by means of a thin array of such wire antennas.