Invisible Magnetic Sensors

Sensing magnetic fields is essential in many applications in biomedicine, transportation, or smart cities. The distortion magnetic sensors create in response to the field they are detecting may hinder their use, for example, in applications requiring dense packaging of sensors or accurately shaped field distributions. For sensing electromagnetic waves, cloaking shells that reduce the scattering of sensors have been introduced. However, the problem of making a magnetic sensor undetectable remains unsolved. Here, we present a general strategy on how to make a sensor magnetically invisible while keeping its ability to sense. The sensor is rendered undetectable by surrounding it with a spherical shell having a tailored magnetic permeability. Our method can be applied to arbitrary shaped magnetic sensors in arbitrary magnetic fields. The invisibility can be made exact when the sensor is spherical and the probed field is uniform. A metasurface composed of superconducting pieces is presented as a practical realization of the ideal invisibility shell. Published by AIP Publishing.