The Transmission Line Model for 2D Materials and van der Waals Heterostructures
arXiv:2507.22549 · doi:10.1103/v5b8-kmm4
Abstract
Van der Waals heterostructures (VdWHs) composed of 2D materials have attracted significant attention in recent years due to their intriguing optical properties, such as strong light-matter interactions and large intrinsic anisotropy. In particular, VdWHs support a variety of polaritons-hybrid quasiparticles arising from the coupling between electromagnetic waves and material excitations-enabling the confinement of electromagnetic radiation to atomic scales. The ability to predict and simulate the optical response of 2D materials heterostructures is thus of high importance, being commonly performed until now via methods such as the TMM, or Fresnel equations. While straight forward, these often yield long and complicated expressions, limiting intuitive and simple access to the underlying physical mechanisms that govern the optical response. In this work, we demonstrate the adaptation of the transmission line model for VdWHs, based on expressing its constituents by distributed electrical circuit elements described by their admittance. Since the admittance carries fundamental physical meaning of the material response to electromagnetic fields, the approach results in a system of propagating voltage and current waves, offering a compact and physically intuitive formulation that simplifies algebraic calculations, clarifies the conditions for existence of physical solutions, and provides valuable insight into the fundamental physical response. To demonstrate this, we derive the transmission line analogs of bulk to monolayer 2D materials and show it can be used to compute the reflection/transmission coefficients, polaritonic dispersion relations, and electromagnetic field distributions in a variety of VdWHs, and compare them to experimental measurements yielding very good agreement. This method provides a valuable tool for exploring and understanding the optical response of layered 2D systems.
References in corpus (36)
- Graphene: Status and Prospects
- Van der Waals heterostructures
- Graphene plasmonics
- Two-Dimensional Material Nanophotonics
- Dyadic Green's Functions and Guided Surface Waves for a Surface Conductivity Model of Graphene
- Excitons in atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides
- Measurement of the optical dielectric function of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers: MoS2, MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2
- Polaritons in layered 2D materials
- Sub-diffractional, volume-confined polaritons in a natural hyperbolic material: hexagonal boron nitride
- Excitonic linewidth approaching the homogeneous limit in MoS2 based van der Waals heterostructures : accessing spin-valley dynamics
- Hyperbolic phonon-polaritons in boron nitride for near-field optical imaging
- Transfer matrix method for optics in graphene layers
- Two-dimensional semiconductors in the regime of strong light-matter coupling
- Cooperative resonances in light scattering from two-dimensional atomic arrays
- An Introduction to Graphene Plasmonics
- Atomically thin mirrors made of monolayer semiconductors
- Effective mode volumes and Purcell factors for leaky optical cavities
- Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory in open electromagnetic systems
- Realization of an atomically thin mirror using monolayer MoSe2
- Optical spectroscopy of excited exciton states in MoS2 monolayers in van der Waals heterostructures
- Quasinormal-mode expansion of the scattering matrix
- Plasmon-exciton polaritons in 2D semiconductor/metal interfaces
- Near-unity light absorption in a monolayer WS2 van der Waals heterostructure cavity
- Tunable Excitons in Biased Bilayer Graphene
- Band Topology, Orbital Phase Winding, and Selection Rules in Excitonic Physics in Two Dimensions
- Resonant-state expansion of dispersive open optical systems
- Roadmap for Photonics with 2D Materials
- Highly Confined In-plane Exciton-Polaritons in Monolayer Semiconductors
- Perfect absorption by an atomically thin crystal
- Light-matter interaction in van der Waals heterostructures
- Coherent Control of Two-Dimensional Excitons
- Absorption and optical selection rules of tunable excitons in biased bilayer graphene
- 2D Semiconductors Superlattices as Hyperbolic Materials
- Electrically Tunable Interband Collective Excitations in Biased Bilayer and Trilayer Graphene
- Tunable Excitons in Rhombohedral Trilayer Graphene
- The Importance of Pure Dephasing in the Optical Response of Excitons in High-quality van der Waals Heterostructures