Cloaking recently attracts a lot of attention from the scientific community due to the progress of advanced technology. There are several ways to do cloaking. Two of them are based on transformation optics and negative index materials. Cloaking based on transformation optics was suggested by Pendry and Leonhardt using transformations which blow up a point into the cloaked regions. The same transformations had previously used by Greenleaf et al. to establish the non-uniqueness for Calderon's inverse problem. These transformations are singular and hence create a lot of difficulty in analysis and practical applications. The second method of cloaking is based on the peculiar properties of negative index materials. It was proposed by Lai et al. and inspired from the concept of complementary media due to Pendry and Ramakrishna. In this talk, I will discuss approximate cloaking using these two methods. Concerning the first one, I will consider the situation, first proposed in the work of Kohn et al., where one uses transformations which blow up a small ball (instead of a point) into cloaked regions. Many interesting issues such as finite energy and resonance will be mentioned. Concerning the second method, I provide the (first) rigorous analysis for cloaking using negative index materials by investigating the situation where the loss (damping) parameter goes to 0. I will also explain how the arguments can be used not only to establish the rigor for other interesting related phenomena using negative index materials such as superlenses and illusion optics but also to enlighten the mechanism of these phenomena.
