Isotropic non-ideal cloaks providing improved invisibility by adaptive segmentation and optimal refractive index...

Mimicking the ideal cloak, which is anisotropic and inhomogeneous, can be achieved by alternating homogeneous isotropic materials, whose permittivity and permeability of each isotropic coating can be determined from effective medium theory. An improved two-fold method is proposed by optimally discretizing the cloak and re-ordering the combination of the effective parameters of each layer to form a smooth step-index profile. The roles of impedance matching and index matching are investigated for cloaking effects. Smoothing the index profile leads to better invisibility than that obtained by smoothing the impedance profile, since the forward scattering can be further diminished. Nonlinear-transformationbased spherical ideal cloaks are studied, and improved design method is explored together with different segmentation schemes. Significant improvement in invisibility is always observed for the optimal segmentation in virtual space with the proposed two-fold design method no matter how nonlinear the coordinate transformation is.