Broadband directional invisibility

Abstract

The discovery of unidirectional invisibility and its broadband realization in optical media satisfying spatial Kramers–Kronig relations are important landmarks of non-Hermitian photonics. We offer a precise characterization of a higher-dimensional generalization of this effect and find sufficient conditions for its realization in the scattering of scalar waves in two and three dimensions and electromagnetic waves in three dimensions. More specifically, given a positive real number α and a continuum of unit vectors Ω, we provide explicit conditions on the interaction potential (or the permittivity and permeability tensors of the scattering medium in the case of electromagnetic scattering) under which it displays perfect (non-approximate) invisibility whenever the incident wavenumber k does not exceed α (i.e., k∈(0,α]) and the direction of the incident wave vector ranges over Ω. A distinctive feature of our approach is that it allows for the construction of potentials and linear dielectric media that display perfect directional invisibility in a finite frequency domain.