Cloaked electromagnetic, acoustic, and quantum amplifiers via transformation optics.

Abstract

The advent of transformation optics and metamaterials has made possible devices producing extreme effects on wave propagation. Here we describe a class of invisible reservoirs and amplifiers for waves, which we refer to as Schrödinger hats. The unifying mathematical principle on which these are based admits such devices for any time harmonic waves modeled by either the Helmholtz or Schrödinger equation, e.g., polarized waves in electromagnetism, acoustical waves and matter waves in quantum mechanics. Schrödinger hats occupy one part of a parameter-space continuum of wave-manipulating structures which also contains standard transformation optics based cloaks, resonant cloaks and cloaked sensors. Possible applications include near-field quantum microscopy.