Plasmonic Waveguides from Coulomb-Engineered Two-Dimensional Metals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to create plasmonic waveguides in 2D metals by tuning Coulomb interactions through dielectric environments, enabling non-invasive confinement of plasmonic excitations.

Contribution

It demonstrates how dielectric structuring can control many-body interactions in 2D metals to achieve plasmonic confinement without altering the material.

Findings

Effective plasmonic confinement within nanometers.

Non-invasive control of plasmonic properties via dielectric engineering.

Identification of optimal energy ranges for confinement.

Abstract

Coulomb interactions play an essential role in atomically-thin materials. On one hand, they are strong and long-ranged in layered systems due to the lack of environmental screening. On the other hand, they can be efficiently tuned by means of surrounding dielectric materials. Thus all physical properties which decisively depend on the exact structure of the electronic interactions can be in principle efficiently controlled and manipulated from the outside via Coulomb engineering. Here, we show how this concept can be used to create fundamentally new plasmonic waveguides in metallic layered materials. We discuss in detail how dielectrically structured environments can be utilized to non-invasively confine plasmonic excitations in an otherwise homogeneous metallic 2D system by modification of its many-body interactions. We define optimal energy ranges for this mechanism and demonstrate plasmonic confinement within several nanometers. In contrast to conventional functionalization mechanisms, this scheme relies on a purely many-body concept and does not involve any direct modifications to the active material itself.