Cloaking using complementary media for electromagnetic waves

Abstract

Negative index materials are artificial structures whose refractive index has negative value over some frequency range. The study of these materials has attracted a lot of attention in the scientific community not only because of their many potential interesting applications but also because of challenges in understanding their intriguing properties due to the sign-changing coefficients in equations describing their properties. In this paper, we establish cloaking using complementary media for electromagnetic waves. This confirms and extends the suggestions of Lai et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102 (2009) 093901] for the full Maxwell equations. The analysis is based on the reflecting and removing localized singularity techniques, three-sphere inequalities, and the fact that the Maxwell equations can be reduced to a weakly coupled second order elliptic equations.