Achieving acoustic cloak by using compressible background flow

We propose a scheme of acoustic spherical cloaking by means of background irrotational flow in compressible fluid. The background flow forms a virtual curved spacetime and guides the sound waves bypass the cloaked objects. To satisfy the laws of real fluid, we show that spatially distributed mass source and momentum source are necessary to supply. The propagation of sound waves in this system is studied via both geometric acoustics approximation and full wave approach. The analytic solution of sound fields is obtained for plane wave incidence. The results reveal the effect of phase retardation (or lead) in comparison with the ordinary transformation-acoustic cloak. In addition, the ability of cloaking is also evaluated for unideal background flows by analyzing the scattering cross section.