Enhanced approximate cloaking by SH and FSH lining

We consider approximate cloaking from a regularization viewpoint introduced in Kohn et al (2008 Inverse Problems 24 015016) for EIT and further investigated in Kohn et al (2010 Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 63 0973-1016) and Liu (2009 Inverse Problems 25 045006) for the Helmholtz equation. The cloaking schemes given by Kohn et al and Liu are shown to be (optimally) within |lnρ| ¹ in 2D and ρ in 3D of perfect cloaking, where ρ denotes the regularization parameter. In this paper, we show that by employing a sound-hard layer right outside the cloaked region, one could (optimally) achieve ρ ^N in ℝ^N ≥ 2, which significantly enhances the near-cloak. We then develop a cloaking scheme by making use of a lossy layer with well-chosen parameters. The lossy-layer cloaking scheme is shown to possess the same cloaking performance as the one with a sound-hard layer. Moreover, it is shown that the lossy layer could be taken as a finite realization of the sound-hard layer. Numerical experiments are also presented to assess the cloaking performances of all the cloaking schemes for comparisons.