Negative reflection and negative refraction in biaxial van der Waals materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how biaxial van der Waals materials can be engineered to exhibit negative reflection and refraction of polaritons, offering tunable optical phenomena for nano-optics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a method to manipulate polariton reflection and refraction in biaxial vdW materials using interface, crystal orientation, and electric tuning, enabling negative and backward reflection.

Findings

Negative and backward reflection observed in simulations.

High tunability of reflection and refraction phenomena.

Theoretical analysis aligns with numerical results.

Abstract

Negative reflection and negative refraction are exotic phenomena that can be achieved by platforms such as double-negative metamaterial, hyperbolic metamaterial, and phase-discontinuity metasurface. Recently, natural biaxial van der Waals (vdW) materials, which support extremely anisotropic, low-loss, and highly confined polaritons from infrared to visible regime, are emerging as promising candidates for planar reflective and refractive optics. Here, we introduce three degrees of freedom, namely interface, crystal direction, and electric tunability to manipulate the reflection and refraction of the polaritons. With broken in-plane symmetry contributed by the interface and crystal direction, distinguished reflection and refraction such as negative and backward reflection, positive and negative refraction could exist simultaneously and exhibit high tunability. The numerical simulations show good consistency with the theoretical analysis. Our findings provide a robust recipe for the realization of negative reflection and refraction in biaxial vdW materials, paving the way for the polaritonics and interface nano-optics.