Switchable and unidirectional plasmonic beacons in hyperbolic 2D materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that elliptically polarized electric dipoles can efficiently and directionally excite hyperbolic 2D material polaritonic modes, enabling switchable, unidirectional subwavelength beam launching with potential for logical gating.

Contribution

It introduces a method for unidirectional polariton excitation using elliptically polarized dipoles, with analytical modeling and control over beam directionality in hyperbolic 2D materials.

Findings

Efficient unidirectional excitation achieved with elliptically polarized dipoles.

Dipole placement influences the number of beams turned off, enabling beam control.

Analytical approximation accurately describes the excitation process.

Abstract

In hyperbolic 2D materials, energy is channeled to their deep subwavelength polaritonic modes via four narrow beams. Here we consider the launching of surface polaritons in the hyperbolic 2D materials and demonstrate that efficient uni-directional excitation is possible with an elliptically polarized electric dipole, with the optimal choice of dipole ellipticity depending on the materials optical constants. The selection rules afforded by the choice of dipole polarization allow turning off up to two beams, and even three if the dipole is placed close to an edge. This makes the dipole a directionally switchable beacon for the launching of sub-difractional polaritonic beams, a potential logical gate. We develop an analytical approximation of the excitation process which describes the results of the numerical simulations well and affords a simple physical interpretation.