Cloaking and magnifying using radial anisotropy

Abstract

This paper studies the electrostatic responses of a polarly radially anisotropic cylinder and a spherically radially anisotropic sphere. For both geometries, the permittivity components differ from each other in the radial and tangential directions. We show that choosing the ratio between these components in a certain way, these rather simple structures can be used in cloaking dielectric inclusions with arbitrary permittivity and shape in the quasi-static limit. For an ideal cloak, the contrast between the permittivity components has to tend to infinity. However, only positive permittivity values are required and a notable cloaking effect can already be observed with relatively moderate permittivity contrasts. Furthermore, we show that the polarly anisotropic cylindrical shell has a complementary capability of magnifying the response of an inner cylinder.