Tunable Phonon Polaritons in Atomically Thin van der Waals Crystals of Boron Nitride

By S. Dai, Z. Fei, Qiong Ma, Aleksandr Rodin, Martin Wagner, Alexander McLeod, Mengkun Liu, W. Gannett, W. Regan, Kenji Watanabe and 9 more. Science, 2014

754 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nanoimaged Polaritons Engineered heterostructures consisting of thin, weakly bound layers can exhibit many attractive electronic properties. Dai et al. (p. 1125) used infrared nanoimaging on the surface of hexagonal boron nitride crystals to detect phonon polaritons, collective modes that originate in the coupling of photons to optical phonons. The findings reveal the dependence of the polariton wavelength and dispersion on the thickness of the material down to just a few atomic layers. Infrared nanoimaging is used to detect a type of surface collective mode in a representative van der Waals crystal. van der Waals heterostructures assembled from atomically thin crystalline layers of diverse two-dimensional solids are emerging as a new paradigm in the physics of materials. We used infrared nanoimaging to study the properties of surface phonon polaritons in a representative van der Waals crystal, hexagonal boron nitride. We launched, detected, and imaged the polaritonic waves in real space and altered their wavelength by varying the number of crystal layers in our specimens. The measured dispersion of polaritonic waves was shown to be governed by the crystal thickness according to a scaling law that persists down to a few atomic layers. Our results are likely to hold true in other polar van der Waals crystals and may lead to new functionalities.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2db2da8a5cd69b1fe38e896539f0b0b49c4a253b

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Citations in the corpus

Polaritons in layered two-dimensional materials. (2016, neutral): “This includes tunable chiral[21, 22], anisotropic and hyperbolic PPs[23, 24]; long-lived hyperbolic PhPs[10, 11, 25] with ar X iv :1 61 0.”
Why all the fuss about 2D semiconductors? (2016, positive): “Using scanning near-field optical microscopy polaritonic waves were launched, detected, and imaged in real space in thin boron nitride flakes and their measured dispersion exhibited hyperbolic dependencedispersion.(17,18) This strong confinement of radiation arises from the anisotropy in the permitt”
Phonon-polaritonics: enabling powerful capabilities for infrared photonics (2019, positive): “As a result the older experimentally extracted model parameters [126] may not be appropriate for single crystalline hBN systems of current interest [108].”