Photorealistic Images of Carpet Cloaks


Photorealistic images of carpet cloaks (9 page pdf)

Using home-built dedicated ray-tracing software, we simulate photorealistic images of sceneries in three dimensions including dielectric carpet cloaks – i.e., continuously varying refractive-index distributions that allow for invisibility cloaking of a bump in a metallic carpet. Results for the ideal and for a simplified cloak are shown. The presented material gives a visual and intuitive impression of the performance of different arrangements and might be ideally suited for communicating the concepts of transformation optics to the general public.

Even an ideal carpet cloak suffers from the “ostrich effect”, i.e., the cloak does make any object under the carpet invisible indeed, but the cloaking structure itself remains visible to some extent. (The ostrich is a large flightless bird native to Africa that sometimes sticks its head into the sand, leaving the rest of its body visible.) We will encounter the visual influence of the ostrich effect in our photorealistic images.