The making of an object invisible through some cloaking device is
commonly regarded as science fiction. But we have found that cloaking
might be realized. Specifically, regions of anomalous localized
resonance, such as occur near superlenses, are shown to lead to
cloaking effects. This occurs when the resonant field generated by a polarizable
line or point dipole acts back on the polarizable line or point
dipole and effectively cancels the field acting on it from outside sources, so it
has essentially no response to the external field. Numerically we see
that the polarizable line or point dipole is effectively
invisible to the external time harmonic field. Cloaking is proved
in the quasistatic limit for finite collections of polarizable line
dipoles that all lie within a specific distance from a coated cylinder
having a shell dielectric constant close to -1 and a matrix and
core dielectric constant close to 1. Cloaking is also shown to
extend to the Veselago superlens outside the quasistatic regime: a
polarizable line dipole located less than a distance d/2 from the lens,
where d is lens thickness, will be cloaked due to the presence of
a resonant field in front of the lens. Also a polarizable point dipole
near a slab lens will be cloaked in the quasistatic limit. The hope
of using cloaking to see the interior of an object by making half of
it invisible remains an intriguing possibility. This is joint
work with Nicolae Nicorovici.