Reconfigurable Metasurface Cloak for Dynamical Electromagnetic Illusions

Considerable attentions have been focused on the realization of carpet cloaks in the past decade. Most of the current carpet cloaks can perform only one electromagnetic (EM) shape for concealing inside objects, and dynamical control of arbitrary EM virtual shapes remains a significant challenge. Here, a desirable method is proposed to construct a reconfigurable carpet cloak using tunable metasurface technology. By controlling the active elements loaded on the metasurface, the surface phase distribution can be dynamically changed to make the cloak generate the predesigned scattering field. This reconfigurable metasurface cloak is experimentally realized at the microwave frequency, which demonstrates that it can not only reduce unwanted scattering for imitating the reflection of a flat metallic plane, but also mimic other different EM virtual shapes by reconfiguring the phase distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first carpet cloak that achieves dynamical illusions by switching the EM shapes without changing its physical shape. The proposed technology could be also extended to the terahertz and even optical domain.