Shear polaritons from transformation optics

Abstract

Natural in-plane hyperbolic crystals (such as α-MoO3) and natural monoclinic crystals (such as β-Ga2O3) have recently drawn great research focus. Despite their obvious similarities, however, these two kinds of materials are usually studied as separate topics. In this Letter, we explore the intrinsic relationship between materials like α-MoO3 and β-Ga2O3 under the framework of transformation optics, providing another perspective to understand the asymmetry of hyperbolic shear polaritons. It is worth mentioning that we demonstrate this novel, to the best of our knowledge, method from theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, which maintain a high degree of consistency. Our work not only combines natural hyperbolic materials with the theory of classical transformation optics, but also opens new avenues for future studies of various natural materials.

General three-dimensional thermal illusion metamaterials

“…Mirage is one of the most well-known optical illusions in nature, which is formed by a curved light path in inhomogeneous air with varying density. Inspired by natural optical illusions, people have designed numerical optical metamaterials [1][2][3] or metasurfaces to create artificial, specific, targeted optical illusions for conformal mapping, [4] shear polaritons, [5] remote cooling, [6] and so on. Similarly, thermal illusions [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] aim at creating fake thermal signals or hiding the thermal target from the background thermal field to mislead infrared (IR) observers for some military applications.…”