Experimental demonstration of a multiphysics cloak: manipulating heat flux and electric current simultaneously

Abstract

In past years, triggered by their successful realizations in electromagnetics, invisible cloaks have experienced rapid development and have been widely pursued in many different fields, though so far only for a single physical system. In this letter we made an unprecedented experimental attempt to show a multidisciplinary framework designed on the basis of two different physical equations. The proposed structure has the exceptional capability to simultaneously control two different physical phenomena according to the predetermined evolution scenarios. As a proof of concept, we implemented an electric-thermal bifunctional device that can guide both electric current and heat flux "across" a strong 'scatter' (air cavity) and restore their original diffusion directions as if nothing exists along the paths, thus rending dual cloaking effects for objects placed inside the cavity. This bifunctional cloaking performance is also numerically verified for a point-source nonuniform excitation. Our results and the fabrication technique presented here will help broaden the current research scope for multiple disciplines and may pave a prominent way to manipulate multiple flows and create new functional devices, e.g., for on-chip applications.