Near-field probing of image phonon-polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride on gold crystals
arXiv:2109.02800 · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abn0627
Abstract
Near-field mapping has been widely used to study hyperbolic phonon-polaritons in van der Waals crystals. However, an accurate measurement of the polaritonic loss remains challenging because of the inherent complexity of the near-field signal and the substrate-mediated loss. Here we demonstrate that large-area monocrystalline gold flakes, an atomically-flat low-loss substrate for image polaritons, provide a platform for precise near-field measurement of the complex propagation constant of polaritons in van der Waals crystals. As a topical example, we measure propagation loss of the image phonon-polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride, revealing that their normalized propagation length exhibits a parabolic spectral dependency. Further, we show that image phonon-polaritons exhibit up to a twice lower normalized propagation loss, while being 2.4 times more compressed compared to the case of dielectric substrate. We conclude that the monocrystalline gold flakes provide a unique nanophotonic platform for probing and exploitation of the image modes in low-dimensional materials.
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Cited by in corpus (6)
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- Nanometer-scale Cavities for Mid-infrared Radiation via Image Phonon Polariton Resonators
- Near-field refractometry of van der Waals crystals
- Prospects to bypass nonlocal phenomena in metals using phonon-polaritons
- Image polaritons in van der Waals crystals