An elasto-mechanical unfeelability cloak made of pentamode metamaterials

Metamaterial-based cloaks make objects different from their surrounding appear just like their surrounding. To date, cloaking has been demonstrated experimentally in many fields of research, including electrodynamics at microwave frequencies, optics, static electric conduction, acoustics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics and quasi two-dimensional solid mechanics. However, cloaking in the seemingly simple case of three-dimensional solid mechanics is more demanding. Here, inspired by invisible core-shell nanoparticles in optics, we design an approximate elasto-mechanical core-shell 'unfeelability' cloak based on pentamode metamaterials. The resulting three-dimensional polymer microstructures with macroscopic overall volume are fabricated by rapid dip-in direct laser writing optical lithography. We quasi-statically deform cloak and control samples in the linear regime and map the displacement fields by autocorrelation-based analysis of recorded movies. The measured and the calculated displacement fields show very good cloaking performance. This means that one can elastically hide objects along these lines.