A general procedure to design objects that are intrinsically invisible (without the necessity of an external cloak) has not been demonstrated so far. Here we propose a flexible method to design such self-cloaked objects by uncoupling the scattered waves from the incident radiation via judiciously manipulating the scattering potential of the object. We show that such a procedure is able to yield optical invisibility for any arbitrarily shaped object within any specified frequency bandwidth by simply employing isotropic nonmagnetic dielectric materials, without the usage of loss or gain material. The validity of the design principle has been verified by direct experimental observations of the spatial electric field profiles and scattering patterns at the microwave regime. Our self-cloaking strategy may have profound implications especially in noninvasive probing, cloaked sensor applications, and scattering-free non-Hermitian optics based systems.

Peer Reviewed