An improved method of designing isotropic multilayered spherical cloak for electromagnetic invisibility

The classic anisotropic spherical cloak can be mimicked by many alternating thin layers of isotropic metamaterials [Qiu et al. Phys. Rev. E 79 (2009) 047602]. We propose an improved method of designing permittivity and permeability in each isotropic layer, which eliminates the jumping of the refractive index at the interface. Multilayered spherical cloaks designed by the present method perform much better than those by Qiu et al., especially for forward scattering. It is found that the ratio of layer thickness to the operating wavelength plays an important role in achieving invisibility. The presented cloak should be discretized to at least 40 layers to meet the thickness threshold corresponding to 10% scattering.