General three-dimensional thermal illusion metamaterials

Abstract

Thermal illusion aims to create fake thermal signals or hide the thermal target from the background thermal field to mislead infrared observers, and illusion thermotics was proposed to regulate heat flux with artificially structured metamaterials for thermal illusion. Most theoretical and experimental works on illusion thermotics focus on two-dimensional materials, while heat transfer in real three-dimensional (3D) objects remains elusive, so the general 3D illusion thermotics is urgently demanded. In this study, we propose a general method to design 3D thermal illusion metamaterials with varying illusions at different sizes and positions. To validate the generality of the 3D method for thermal illusion metamaterials, we realize thermal functionalities of thermal shifting, splitting, trapping, amplifying and compressing. In addition, we propose a special way to simplify the design method under the condition that the size of illusion target is equal to the size of original heat source. The 3D thermal illusion metamaterial paves a general way for illusion thermotics and triggers the exploring of illusion metamaterials for more functionalities and applications.