Room-temperature broadband quasistatic magnetic cloak

In the past decade, invisible cloaks have experienced rapid research development in the metamaterial community driven by their revolutionary practical potentials. Among them, magnetic cloaks, which are able to conceal metallic or magnetic objects from electromagnetic induction detection, have attracted a great amount of attention. However, applications of these reported devices are limited by their low-temperature environment requirement because of the involvement of superconductors to acquire the perfect diamagnetic response. In this work, we remove this temperature hurdle by fully taking the diamagnetic features of usual metals and demonstrate a three-dimensional room temperature quasistatic magnetic cloak using a ferromagnetic metallic bilayer structure. Experimentally, our device exhibits a prominent cloaking effect in a wide frequency range from 5 to 250 kHz with a maximum field disturbance ratio o0.5%. The practical potential is verified through a commercial handheld metal probe working at 25 kHz. Our results unambiguously show that an invisible cloak may be realized in the low-frequency region for scenarios where screening an external magnetic field without disturbance is specifically demanded. NPG Asia Materials (2017) 9, e341; doi:10.1038/am.2016.197; published online 13 January 2017