Tunable mid-infrared hyperbolic van der Waals metasurfaces by strong plasmon-phonon polaritons coupling

TL;DR

This paper introduces tunable mid-infrared hyperbolic van der Waals metasurfaces based on h-BN and graphene heterostructures, enabling active control of hyperbolic polaritons through strong plasmon-phonon coupling.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel strategy for creating tunable hyperbolic metasurfaces using heterostructures of h-BN and graphene, with active manipulation of polaritonic waves.

Findings

Large tunability of light fields via chemical potential adjustment

Topological transitions and unidirectional polariton propagation

Enhanced local density of states in the metasurfaces

Abstract

Hyperbolic metasurfaces based on van der Waals (vdW) materials support propagation of extremely anisotropic polaritons towards nanoscale light compression and manipulation, and thus has great potential in the applications of planar hyperlens, nanolasing, quantum optics and ultrasensitive infrared spectroscopy. Two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) as a vdW metasurface can manipulate the propagation of hyperbolic polaritons at the level of single atomic layers, possessing higher degree of field confinement and lower losses than the conventional media. However, active manipulation of hyperbolic polaritonic waves in h-BN midinfrared metasurfaces remains elusive. Herein, we provide an effective strategy for constructing tunable mid-infrared hyperbolic vdW metasurfaces (HMSs). They are composed of meta-atoms that are the in-plane heterostructures of thin-layer h-BN and monolayer graphene strips (iHBNG). The strong coupling of h-BN phonons and graphene plasmons enables the large tunability of light fields by tailoring chemical potentials of graphene without frequency shift, which involves topological transitions of polaritonic modes, unidirectional polariton propagation and local-density-of-state enhancement. Simulated visual near-field distributions of iHBNG metasurfaces reveal the unique transformations of hyperbolic polariton propagations, distinguished from that of individual h-BN and graphene metasurfaces. Our findings provide a platform of optical nanomanipulation towards emerging on-chip polaritonic devices.