Equatorial magnetoplasma waves

Abstract

Due to its rotation, Earth traps a few equatorial ocean and atmospheric waves, including Kelvin, Yanai, Rossby, and Poincare modes. It has been recently demonstrated that the mathematical origin of equatorial waves is intricately related to the nontrivial topology of hydrodynamic equations describing oceans or the atmosphere. In the present work, we consider plasma oscillations supported by a two-dimensional electron gas confined at the surface of a sphere or a cylinder. We argue that in the presence of a uniform magnetic field, these systems host a set of equatorial magnetoplasma waves that are counterparts to the equatorial waves trapped by Earth. For a spherical geometry, the equatorial modes are well developed only if their penetration length is smaller than the radius of the sphere. For a cylindrical geometry, the spectrum of equatorial modes is weakly dependent on the cylinder radius and overcomes finite-size effects. We argue that this exceptional robustness can be explained by destructive interference effects. We discuss possible experimental setups, including grains and rods composed of topological insulators (e.g., Bi2Se3) or metal-coated dielectrics (e.g., Au2S).

14 pages, and 6 figures. Published version

References in corpus (7)

• Topological Photonics
• Magnetic field tuning of terahertz Dirac plasmons in graphene
• Intrinsic Terahertz Plasmons and Magnetoplasmons in Large Scale Monolayer Graphene
• Spherical topological insulator
• Bulk-Free Topological Insulator Bi2Se3 nanoribbons with Magnetotransport Signatures of Dirac Surface States
• Theory of Bernstein Modes in Graphene
• Plasmonic modes at inclined edges of anisotropic 2D materials