Nano Letters
Nano Letters
5 years ago

Efficiency of Launching Highly Confined Polaritons by Infrared Light Incident on a Hyperbolic Material

Efficiency of Launching Highly Confined Polaritons by Infrared Light Incident on a Hyperbolic Material
Trond I. Andersen, Alex McLeod, Zhe Fei, Jeremy Rosenfeld, Michael M. Fogler, Takashi Taniguchi, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, Kenji Watanabe, Yafang Yang, Fritz Keilmann, Mark Thiemens, D. N. Basov, Siyuan Dai, Qiong Ma, Yinming Shao, Zhiyuan Sun, Mengkun Liu, Michael D. Goldflam
We investigated phonon–polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride—a naturally hyperbolic van der Waals material—by means of the scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy. Real-space nanoimages we have obtained detail how the polaritons are launched when the light incident on a thin hexagonal boron nitride slab is scattered by various intrinsic and extrinsic inhomogeneities, including sample edges, metallic nanodisks deposited on its top surface, random defects, and surface impurities. The scanned tip of the near-field microscope is itself a polariton launcher whose efficiency proves to be superior to all the other types of polariton launchers we studied. Our work may inform future development of polaritonic nanodevices as well as fundamental studies of collective modes in van der Waals materials.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b01587

DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b01587

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.