Light-programmable manipulation of DC field in Laplacian Meta-devices

Abstract

Impressive progresses have been achieved in the field of metamaterial to mimic the illusion or camouflage effects in nature. These include invisible cloaks and many other cloak-based illusion meta-devices. However, to date many experiments only present single, static or discretized functionalities. The dynamical control of multiple kinds of illusion signals can only be achieved by embedding complex active sources directly connected to external stimuli, leading to limited on/off switching effect in a contact fashion. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a distinct scheme to incorporate multi-functions into one passive Laplacian DC meta-device, assisted by light illumination. It is shown that light-programmable cloaking, full illusion, and partial illusion can be achieved on the same device without physical contact of the heating pads or electric bias, at the cost of only four kinds of natural bulk materials with homogeneous parameters throughout. A DC network is fabricated to demonstrate the proof of concept, with measurement results in good agreement with the numerical simulations. The proposed scheme may open a new avenue to the non-contact multiphysical control of multi-illusion functions for Laplacian fields. © 2018, The Author(s).