Towards active dispersionless ENZ metamaterial for cloaking applications

The majority of the designs of electromagnetic cloaks presented in the current literature require a metamaterial, the relative permittivity and/or permeability of which are smaller than one. Due to basic dispersion constraints, such permittivity (or permeability) can exist only within some restricted frequency band. This fact causes a passive electromagnetic cloak to be an inherently narrowband device. Here, it is shown both numerically and experimentally that the basic dispersion constraints of any passive medium might be overcome by using an active transmission line-based metamaterial. This type of metamaterial appears promising for the design of broadband cloaking devices.