Ultra-Confinement of Polaritons in Single Atomic Layer Ag Photonic Quantum Dots

Abstract

Light scattering by two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals heterostructures (vdWHs) is immense, especially given their infinitesimal volume, thus enabling strong light-matter interactions. Surface 2D polariton waves manifest through large concentration of electromagnetic field in vertical direction, normal to their propagation. By confining vdWH materials into 2D photonic shapes, one can manipulate and compress light in lateral directions. Scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy is a perfect tool for direct imaging of the propagating polaritons and studying the properties of confined polaritons in nanostructures. Though, thus far the quantitative analysis, such the wavelength extraction, has been challenged for confined polaritons by incapability of mapping of the wave period on sub-wavelength scale and difficulty of identifying an adequate substrate's "background" to subtract. Here, an analytical approach is developed to reveal the local propagation constant of confined polaritons under abovementioned constraints and map it with the sub-wavelength resolution. Applied to analysis of the SiC/2D-Ag/EG (epitaxial graphene) photonic nanostructures, the technique uncovered that the polaritons are highly confined in both vertical ($\sim \lambda$/50) and lateral directions ($\sim \lambda$/40) by 2D metal.

References in corpus (8)

• Two-Dimensional Material Nanophotonics
• Highly confined low-loss plasmons in graphene-boron nitride heterostructures
• Mid-infrared plasmons in scaled graphene nanostructures
• Sub-diffractional, volume-confined polaritons in a natural hyperbolic material: hexagonal boron nitride
• Silicon carbide stacking-order-induced doping variation in epitaxial graphene
• Exciton Assisted Deeply Subwavelength Nano-Photonics
• Large-Area Intercalated 2D-Pb/Graphene Heterostructure as a Platform for Generating Spin-Orbit Torque
• Confined monolayer Ag as a large gap 2D semiconductor and its momentum resolved excited states