Cloaking object on an optofluidic chip: its theory and demonstration.

Recently, the design of metamaterial guided by transformation optics (TO) has emerged as an effective method to hide objects from optical detection, based on arranging a bended light beam to detour. However, this TO-based solution involves fabrication of material with complicated distribution of permittivity and permeability, and the device falls short of tunability after fabrication. In this work, we propose an optofluidic model employing the method of streamline tracing-based transformation optofluidics (STTOF) to hydrodynamically reconfigure light propagation in a given flow field for object-cloaking purposes. The proof-of-concept is demonstrated and tested on an optofluidic chip to validate our proposed theory. Experimental results show that our proposed STTOF method can be used to successfully detour the light path from the object under cloaking in a mathematically pre-defined manner.

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