  Ground-plane cloaks, which transform a curved mirror into a flat one, and
recently reported at wavelengths ranging from the optical to the visible
spectrum, bring the realm of optical illusion a step closer to reality.
However, all carpet-cloaking experiments have thus far been carried out in the
far-field. Here, we demonstrate numerically and experimentally that a
dielectric photonic crystal (PC) of a complex shape made of a honeycomb array
of air holes can scatter waves in the near field like a PC with a at boundary
at stop band frequencies. This mirage effect relies upon a specific arrangement
of dielectric pillars placed at the nodes of a quasi-conformal grid dressing
the PC. Our carpet is shown to work throughout the range of wavelengths 1500nm
to 1650nm within the stop band extending from 1280 to 1940 nm. The device has
been fabricated using a single- mask advanced nanoelectronics technique on
III-V semiconductors and the near field measurements have been carried out in
order to image the wave fronts's curvatures around the telecommunication
wavelength 1550 nm.
