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Laser Photonics Rev. 9, No. 4, 399–404 (2015) / DOI 10.1002/lpor.201500020

Abstract Transformation optics, a recent geometrical de-

sign strategy of light manipulation with both ray trajectories
and optical phase controlled simultaneously, promises an
invisibility cloaking device that can render a macroscopic
object invisible even to a scientific instrument measuring
optical phase. Recent “carpet” cloaks have extended their
cloaking capability to broadband frequency ranges and macro-
scopic scales, but they only demonstrated the recovery of ray
trajectories after passing through the cloaks, while whether
the optical phase would reveal their existence still remains
unverified. In this paper, a phase-preserved macroscopic
visible-light carpet cloak is demonstrated in a geometrical con-
struction beyond two dimensions. As an extension of previous

ORIGINAL
two-dimensional (2D) macroscopic carpet cloaks, this almost-

PAPER
three-dimensional carpet cloak exhibits three-dimensional (3D)
invisibility for illumination near its center (i.e. with a limited
field of view), and its ideal wide-angle invisibility performance
pulsed-laser interferometer, which provides unique experimen-
is preserved in multiple 2D planes intersecting in the 3D
tal evidence on the geometrical nature of transformation optics.
space. Optical path length is measured with a broadband

Phase-preserved macroscopic visible-light carpet cloaking

beyond two dimensions
Chia-Wei Chu1,2 , Xiaomin Zhai1,2 , Chih Jie Lee2,3 , Po-Hao Wang1,2 , Yubo Duan4 ,
Din Ping Tsai2,3,5,∗ , Baile Zhang6,7,∗ , and Yuan Luo1,2,8,∗

1. Introduction
The geometrical perception of optical space from the view-
point of light is manifested in both the light-ray trajectory
and the optical phase, or optical path length, whose sig-
nificance was recognized back in the age of Fermat. How-
ever, it was not until recently that geometrical schemes
were systematically applied in designing optical devices
by artificially creating a virtual optical space through a co-
ordinate transformation, whose approach is now widely
called transformation optics [1–13]. A unique promise
made by transformation optics is an invisibility cloak that
can render a macroscopic object invisible [1, 2]. The first
transformation-optics invisibility cloak was implemented
in a two-dimensional (2D) plane in a narrow microwave
frequency band [4]. To extend the bandwidth, a dielectric
isotropic carpet cloak designed from 2D quasiconformal
mapping [5] was proposed that can hide an object sitting
on a flat ground plane, and was subsequently realized at
both microwave [6] and infrared frequencies [7, 8]. An at-
tempt to extend dimensions from 2D to 3D has been made
by rotating the original 2D carpet cloak design around its
central axis [9] or extending it along the third dimension
[10]. However, the original 2D carpet cloak design intrin-
sically possessed a lateral shift of ray trajectory that is
comparable to the height of the hidden object [14], and
thus remained detectable. On the other hand, a modified
carpet cloak that preserved anisotropy [11,12] successfully
realized visible-light macroscopic cloaking in a 2D geom-
etry. However, it remains unverified whether the optical
phase through the macroscopic cloaks has been disturbed,
in view that in some scenarios transformation-optics cloaks
indeed disturb the phase [1, 3]. Recently, a novel core–
shell cloak different from transformation-optics cloaks has
cloaked a macroscopic object in a turbid paint-water sus-
pension, where light exhibits the properties of a diffusive
field without phase information [15], and thus there is no
need to measure optical phase. All these subtle and intricate

1
Center for Optoelectronic Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 10051
2
Molecular Imaging Center, Optical Imaging Core Laboratory, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 10617
3
Department of Physics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 10617
4
Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117574
5
Research Center for Applied Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, 11529
6
Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 637371
7
Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 637371
8
Department of Optics and Photonics, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan, 32001
∗
Corresponding author: e-mails: dptsai@phys.ntu.edu.tw; blzhang@ntu.edu.sg; yuanluo@ntu.edu.tw


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400 C.-W. Chu et al.: Phase-preserved macroscopic visible-light carpet cloaking beyond two dimensions

issues in macroscopic cloaking are relevant to the question

of whether the optical phase can be preserved.
It is the purpose of this paper to decisively demon-
strate the phase preservation of previous macroscopic carpet
cloaks, in an extended geometry beyond two dimensions.
Firstly, although optical phase cloaking is of interest in this
paper, one should keep in mind that a cloak first should ful-
fill the functionality of cloaking from optical rays. So we
will first demonstrate the recovery of output ray trajectories,
as was done in most previous studies [4, 6–12]. Secondly,
a previous attempt has been made to measure optical phase
of scattering off a 3D cloaking device at the nanoscale
[16]. This adopted a phase unwrapping technique, which
generally does not apply at a macroscopic level with high
accuracy because of its 2π ambiguity. However, with a
pulsed-laser interferometer, it is still possible to measure
the phase accurately without phase unwrapping.
Here, we adopt a simplified almost-3D carpet cloak
immersed in a laser liquid working with polarized light for
the demonstration. The 3D invisibility performance of the
simplified cloak is preserved for illumination near the center
(i.e. with a limited field of view), and the ideal wide-angle
invisibility performance is preserved in multiple 2D planes
intersecting in the 3D space. In particular, the optical path
length of rays passing through the cloak has been exactly
measured at the macroscopic level with a broadband pulsed-
laser interferometer, after confirmation of controlling ray
trajectories in the 3D space.
Note that the current work aims at demonstrating optical
phase cloaking for the general approach of carpet cloaking
(i.e. “hiding under a carpet” [5]), with no intention to solve
some intrinsic limitations such as it only works for reflection
in a dielectric environment at optical frequencies.

Figure 1 Design of a simplified almost-three-dimensional

2. Cloak design and fabrication
Let us start with a perfect 3D carpet cloak that is invisible for
all viewing angles, as illustrated in Fig. 1a, which consists of
one central octagonal cylinder (region I; Fig. 1b), eight tri-
angular prisms (region II; Fig. 1c), and eight triangular pyra-
mids (region III; Fig. 1d). This cloak squeezes optical space
by lifting the bottom of the octagonal cylinder to a height of
h, when the original height of the octagonal cylinder is H.
A perfectly hidden physical space, as indicated in yellow in
Fig. 1a, can be created under the squeezed optical space. A
2D cross section of the squeezed optical space is also illus-
trated, where a light ray is incident on the cloak from the
left to the right as if the hidden region were flat. The corre-
sponding coordinate transformation from the virtual space
with coordinates (x, y, z) into the physical space with coor-
dinates (x  , y  , z  ) can be written explicitly. For all regions,
we have x  = x and z  = z in common. The transformations
in the y direction for different regions can be written as fol-
lows: y  = κ y + h (the central octagonal cylinder; Fig. 1b),
y  = κ y + τ (d − x) (triangular prisms; Fig. 1c), and y  =
((H − h)/H )y + h(1 − x/(d cos α2 )) (triangular pyramids;
Fig. 1d), where κ = (H − h)/H , τ = dh , and α = π4 . We
cloak. (a) Schematic of a transformation-based perfect three-
dimensional cloak. The cloak consists of one central octagonal
cylinder located at the center (b), and eight triangular prisms (c)
and eight triangular pyramids (d) fanned out on the periphery. (e)
Schematic of the simplified almost-three-dimensional cloak that
can be implemented with α-BBO crystal.
now let the length of d = 15.2 mm, and two heights of
H = 10.64 mm and h = 0.64 mm, respectively. The ma-
terials in different regions have three orthogonal principal
refractive indices ni,1 , ni,2 and ni,3 , where i = I, II and III.
We can obtain the principal values of refractive indices for
different regions according to transformation optics [1,2] as
n I,1 = 1.638 and n I,2 = n I,3 = 1.54 for the central octago-
nal cylinder, n II,1 = 1.649, n I I,2 = 1.529 and n II,3 = 1.54
for the triangular prisms, and n III,1 = 1.65, n III,2 = 1.529
and n III,3 = 1.54 for the triangular pyramids, respectively,
when we set the refractive index of the background to be
1.54.
To simplify the implementation, we first fix the light
polarization to be the one with magnetic field parallel to
the ground plane. We then preserve the 3D invisibility
performance of the cloak within a limited field of view


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 ORIGINAL
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Laser Photonics Rev. 9, No. 4 (2015) 401

(i.e. when the light is incident on the octagonal cylinder),

and preserve the wide-angle invisibility performance of the
cloak in multiple 2D planes intersecting in the 3D space
(i.e. when the light is incident on the sides of the triangular
prisms along axial directions). An illustration of the
simplified cloak as well as its invisible illumination region
and invisible planes of incidence is plotted in Fig. 1e. We
completely remove triangular pyramids on the periphery as
unimportant for demonstration. A natural negative uniaxial
crystal BaB2 O4 (α-BBO; no = 1.64, ne = 1.53) was
chosen to implement this design. Nine polished pieces of
α-BBO crystal were cemented together with an optical
liquid photopolymer (Norland Optical Adhesive 61), which
cures after exposure to ultraviolet light [17]. The bottom of
the cloak was coated with silver to form a reflective surface.

3. Demonstration of cloaking from optical

rays

We then proceed to demonstrate the almost-3D invisibility

performance of the simplified cloak. The first step is to
show that ray trajectories are precisely controlled as if the
hidden macroscopic object did not exist. The experimental
setup is illustrated in Fig. 2a. The cloak sitting on a mirror
that served as the flat ground plane was immersed in a glass
tank filled with a colorless laser liquid (Cargille Labs, Code
1074; n = 1.54 measured at a wavelength of 589 nm). A
diffractive object (a 0.5 mm × 10 mm × 10 mm reflective
grating with groove period of 4.8 μm) was selected as the
object to be hidden. A transmission pattern of a number
“3” and a letter “H” was illuminated by a continuous-wave
laser diode at a wavelength of 532 nm (green) polarized
with magnetic field parallel to the ground plane. The light
transmitted through the number “3” (Ray 1) went through
the cloak with the hidden diffractive object underneath and
was reflected at the bottom of the cloak, while the light
transmitted through the letter “H” (Ray 2) was reflected on
the mirror surface directly. A digital camera (Canon EOS
650D) was used to capture images projected on a screen
that was placed about 5 cm away from the cloak. Note that
the incidence angle θ is defined as the angle between the
incident light and the flat mirror inside the tank. The angle
physically tuned in the experiment was the angle of the
incident laser beam outside the tank.
Figures 2b–d show images for a fixed azimuthal viewing
angle ϕ = 0ο and a fixed incidence angle θ = 25ο . The
uncloaked diffractive object generated multiple images of
the number “3” on the screen because of grating diffraction,
while the flat mirror surface produced only one image of
the letter “H” because of the mirror reflection. When the
diffractive object was hidden by the cloak, as in Fig. 2d, the
original multiple images of the number “3” on the screen
turned to be the only one located at the same altitude of
the image of the letter “H” reflected from the flat mirror
surface, as if the diffractive object were not there.
To further demonstrate the almost-3D invisibility per-
formance in a broad bandwidth, measurements were
Figure 2 Experimental setup and results of measuring ray tra-
jectories through the cloak. (a) The cloak that hides a diffractive
object is immersed in a colorless laser liquid with refractive index
1.54. A green laser beam at the wavelength of 532 nm illuminates
a mask of a number “3” and a letter “H” (L = 23 mm) on the left
side of the tank. Light transmitted through the number “3” (Ray 1)
can go through the cloak, while light through the letter “H” (Ray 2)
will be reflected on the flat ground plane directly. A digital camera
captures light spots shown on the screen behind the tank. (b)
When only the flat mirror is present, the images of “3” and “H”
are located at the same altitude. (c) When the diffractive object
sits on top of the mirror surface without the cloak, its reflection
generates multiple images of “3”. (d) When the cloak is hiding
the diffractive object, the original multiple images of “3” turn to be
only one at the same altitude of the image of “H” reflected from
the mirror surface. The azimuthal viewing angle is fixed at φ = 0ο
and the incidence angle is fixed at ϕ = 25ο .
performed at different azimuthal viewing angles with other
wavelengths at 636 nm (red) and 473 nm (blue), as shown in
Fig. 3. With the fixed incidence angle θ = 25ο , images on the
screen for the azimuthal viewing angles of ϕ = 0ο and 45ο
with 636 nm wavelength, and those for ϕ = 90ο and 135ο
with 473 nm wavelength, are shown in Figs. 3b and c and d
and e, respectively. Images of the number “3” reflected from
the diffractive object without the cloak changed their orien-
tation at different azimuthal viewing angles. The intensity
of these images changed with wavelength because of the
intrinsic dispersion of the diffractive object. In Figs. 3a and
d, when the diffractive object was cloaked, its reflection
exhibited only one image of the number “3” at the same
altitude as the image of the letter “H” reflected from the flat

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402 C.-W. Chu et al.: Phase-preserved macroscopic visible-light carpet cloaking beyond two dimensions

Figure 3 Experimental results of measuring ray trajectories at different azimuthal viewing angles with different wavelengths. (a) Image
on the screen when the cloak is hiding the diffractive object at 636 nm wavelength (red). (b and c) Images on the screen when there is
no cloak hiding the diffractive object at 636 nm wavelength along the viewing planes of ϕ = 0ο and 45ο , respectively. (d) Image on the
screen when the cloak is hiding the diffractive object at 473 nm wavelength (blue). (e and f) Images on the screen when there is no
cloak hiding the diffractive object at 473 nm wavelength along the viewing planes of ϕ = 90ο and 135ο , respectively. In all the results,
the incidence angle is fixed at θ = 25ο .

mirror surface. Measurement at different incidence angles
showed similar results [17].
4. Demonstration of cloaking from optical
phase
In the second step, we demonstrate cloaking of optical phase
by measuring the optical path length directly. For the pur-
pose of high accuracy in the optical path length measure-
ment without phase unwrapping, a pulsed-broadband-laser
interferometer (equipped with a Ti: sapphire mode-locked
femtosecond laser from Spectra Physics, Mountain View,
CA) was adopted. Ideally, the experiment should be done
in the laser liquid environment with refractive index 1.54.
To ensure high accuracy and exclude disturbance from the
instable liquid environment, the cloak was put in air directly
because only the optical path inside the cloak is of interest.
As shown in Fig. 4a, laser pulses with magnetic field
parallel to the ground plane passed through a half-wave
plate and then a linear polarizer to fix the light polarization
with high accuracy. Mirror 1 (M1) defined the reference
path in air, and Mirror 2 (M2) defined the signal path where
the light going through the cloak was reflected back. The
coherence length of the laser source (central wavelength of
800 nm; spectral bandwidth of 20 nm) was calculated
to be 14 μm [18, 19], which we take as the nominal axial
accuracy in the optical path length measurement. When
an interference pattern was observed at the exit arm of
the interferometer (such as the experimentally observed
example in the inset in Fig. 4a), optical path lengths of the
reference path and the signal path were matched precisely
up to the coherence length of the laser source, i.e. 14 μm.
By comparing the locations of the reference mirror M1
in two measurements – one with the laser beam reflected
from M2 going through the cloak (red path of light ray
in Fig. 4b); the other when there was only the flat mirror
without the cloak (blue path of light ray in Fig. 4b) – the dif-
ference in optical path lengths in these two measurements,
or the optical path length different (OPD), can be deter-
mined. For simplicity, we only consider illumination in the
3D invisible illumination cone, or when the illumination
is incident on the top of the octagonal cylinder. Then, the
height of the cloaked space under the cloak was calculated
according to the following equations:
OPD n2
h = Hθ  =90◦ (1 − tan β) − 
2 n n 2 − n 2 cos2 θ 
1 2 b
and
⎛ ⎞

n n cos θ
β = tan−1 ⎝  ⎠,
1 b
n 2 n 22 − n 2b cos2 θ 
where h is the height of the hidden volume underneath the
cloak, H is the height of the cloak, n 1 and n 2 are extraordi-
nary and ordinary refractive indices of the central octagonal
cylinder of the cloak, θ  is the incidence angle in air, and β
is the angle of the ray path (i.e. the Poynting vector) inside
the cloak as shown in Fig. 4b.
The measurement was repeated for different incidence
angles (θ ) between 65o and 90o at various azimuthal view-
ing angles. Results of the calculated height of the hidden
space at azimuthal viewing angles of ϕ = 0o and 45o are
shown in Fig. 4c, being consistent with the real height.


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Laser Photonics Rev. 9, No. 4 (2015)
Figure 4 Experimental set-up and results for optical path length
measurement. (a) Experimental set-up of a pulsed-broadband-
laser interferometer. The cloak is illuminated with adjustable in-
cidence angles and azimuthal viewing angles. An experimentally
recorded interference pattern is shown as the inset. (b) Illustration
of the ray path going through the cloak. The blue path represents
the ray path without the cloak, while the red path represents the
ray path with the cloak. (c) Height of the hidden space is cal-
culated from measured optical path length at different incidence
angles (θ) and azimuthal viewing planes (ϕ), which is in agree-
ment with the real height.
Measurements with other azimuthal viewing angles showed
similar results.
5. Conclusions
In conclusion, we designed, fabricated, and experimentally
demonstrated a phase-preserved macroscopic carpet cloak
beyond two dimensions in the visible spectrum. Our work
not only demonstrated the phase preservation for the general
approach of carpet cloaking, but also realized an artificial
macroscopic geometry of light for invisibility that is mani-
fested in both ray trajectories and optical phase at the same
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ORIGINAL
PAPER
403
time, which is a step forward toward 3D transformation-
optics devices. Despite the fact that the demonstrated carpet
cloak only works for reflection and needs to be immersed in
a fluid, it might find applications in reflection-mode optical
lithography when a defect on a lithography mask needs to
be cloaked, or a local pattern needs to be modified, without
rebuilding the whole mask.
Supporting Information
Additional supporting information may be found in the online ver-
sion of this article at the publisher’s website.
Acknowledgements. We acknowledge financial support from
Taiwan National Science Council (100-2218-E-002-026-MY3 and
102-2745-M-002-005-ASP / NSC102 - 2811 - M - 002 - 084),
Taiwan National Health Research Institutes (EX102-10220EC),
National Taiwan University (102R7832), Nanyang Technological
University for Start-Up Grants, Singapore Ministry of Education
under Grant No. Tier 1 RG27/12 and Grant No. MOE2011-T3-
1-005. We thank Jer-Liang Andrew Yew, Yu Chiang Wang for
making the diffractive object. C.-W.C. and X.Z. contributed equally
to this work.
Received: 22 January 2015, Revised: 27 March 2015,
Accepted: 31 May 2015
Published online: 18 June 2015
Key words: macroscopic cloaking, optical phase, dimensions.
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