Probing the ultimate plasmon confinement limits with a van der Waals heterostructure
Name
1804.01061.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
3 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
60b7e3e7a6a109cc9f7f9aec038de8c2
Author(s)
Alcaraz Iranzo, David
Nanot, Sébastien
Dias, Eduardo JC
Epstein, Itai
Peng, Cheng
Efetov, Dmitri K
Lundeberg, Mark B
Parret, Romain
Osmond, Johann
Hong, Jin-Yong
Date Issued
2018
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2017 The Authors. The ability to confine light into tiny spatial dimensions is important for applications such as microscopy, sensing, and nanoscale lasers. Although plasmons offer an appealing avenue to confine light, Landau damping in metals imposes a trade-off between optical field confinement and losses. We show that a graphene-insulator-metal heterostructure can overcome that trade-off, and demonstrate plasmon confinement down to the ultimate limit of the length scale of one atom. This is achieved through far-field excitation of plasmon modes squeezed into an atomically thin hexagonal boron nitride dielectric spacer between graphene and metal rods. A theoretical model that takes into account the nonlocal optical response of both graphene and metal is used to describe the results. These ultraconfined plasmonic modes, addressed with far-field light excitation, enable a route to new regimes of ultrastrong light-matter interactions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.AAR8438
