Cylindrical invisibility cloak with simplified material parameters is inherently visible.

It was proposed that perfect invisibility cloaks can be constructed for hiding objects from electromagnetic illumination [J. B. Pendry, D. Schurig, and D. R. Smith, Science 312, 1780 (2006)10.1126/science.1125907]. The cylindrical cloaks experimentally demonstrated [D. Schurig, Science 314, 977 (2006)10.1126/science.1133628] and theoretically proposed [W. Cai, Nat. Photon. 1, 224 (2007)10.1038/nphoton.2007.28] have however simplified material parameters in order to facilitate easier realization as well as to avoid infinities in optical constants. Here we show that the cylindrical cloaks with simplified material parameters inherently allow the zeroth-order cylindrical wave to pass through the cloak as if the cloak is made of a homogeneous isotropic medium, and thus visible. To all high-order cylindrical waves, our numerical simulation suggests that the simplified cloak inherits some properties of the ideal cloak, but finite scatterings exist.