Photonic crystals for nano-light in moiré graphene superlattices

Abstract

Graphene is an atomically thin plasmonic medium that supports highly confined plasmon polaritons, or nano-light, with very low loss. Electronic properties of graphene can be drastically altered when it is laid upon another graphene layer, resulting in a moiré superlattice. The relative twist angle between the two layers is a key tuning parameter of the interlayer coupling in thus obtained twisted bilayer graphene (TBG). We studied propagation of plasmon polaritons in TBG by infrared nano-imaging. We discovered that the atomic reconstruction occurring at small twist angles transforms the TBG into a natural plasmon photonic crystal for propagating nano-light. This discovery points to a pathway towards controlling nano-light by exploiting quantum properties of graphene and other atomically layered van der Waals materials eliminating need for arduous top-down nanofabrication.

References in corpus (8)

• Topological Photonics
• Asymmetry gap in the electronic band structure of bilayer graphene
• Highly confined low-loss plasmons in graphene-boron nitride heterostructures
• Topological confinement in bilayer graphene
• Electronic Highways in Bilayer Graphene
• Phase Resolved Surface Plasmon Interferometry of Graphene
• Plasmon reflections by topological electronic boundaries in bilayer graphene
• Structural and electronic properties of Si/Ge nanoparticles

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Boundary edge networks induced by bulk topology
• High resolution imaging of reconstructed domains and moire patterns in functional van der Waals heterostructure devices