Prospects for poor-man's cloaking with low-contrast all-dielectric optical elements

We discuss the prospects for low-contrast all-dielectric cloaking and offer a simple picture illustrating the basic obstacle for perfect cloaking without materials with an effective double-negative response. However, the same simple picture also gives directions for less perfect designs allowing for planar transmitted fields, but at the price of phase-slips which can only be eliminated at well-defined frequencies where the phase-slip amounts to a multiple of 2p.

As a particular example, we consider assemblies of all-dielectric Lüneburg lenses forming a porous structure allowing for hiding objects inside the pores, independently on the polarization of the incident field. Cloaking must in general be realized with metamaterials realized through sub-wavelength structures, i.e.

L l with L being the period and l the free-space wavelength. Interestingly, cloaking-like operations with Lüneburg-lens arrays perform in the opposite limit with L l