Launching Focused and Spatially Confined Phonon-Polaritons in Hexagonal Boron Nitride

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel cavity-based method to generate and control highly confined phonon-polaritons in isotropic hexagonal boron nitride, enabling advanced nanoscale light manipulation.

Contribution

Introducing a new cavity-based approach to launch and focus phonon-polaritons in isotropic materials like hBN, achieving record-high spatial confinement and controllable propagation.

Findings

Record-high in-plane confinement up to λ/70.

Efficient coupling of cavities to mid-infrared light.

Control over wavefront curvature and polariton focusing.

Abstract

Phonon-polaritons offer significant opportunities for low-loss, subdiffractional light guiding at the nanoscale. Despite extensive efforts to enhance control in polaritonic media, focused and spatially confined phonon-polariton waves have only been realized in in-plane-anisotropic crystals (e.g., MoO$_3$) and remain elusive in in-plane-isotropic materials (e.g., hexagonal boron nitride, hBN). In this study, we introduce a novel approach to launching phonon-polaritons by leveraging hBN subwavelength cavities at the Au/SiO$_2$ interface, enabling efficient coupling of cavities to the far-field component of mid-infrared light. Utilizing standard lithographic techniques, we fabricated subwavelength cavities of various shapes and sizes, demonstrating strong field enhancement, resonant mode localization, and generation of propagating phonon-polaritons with well-defined spatial structure. The cavity geometry governs wavefront curvature, spatial confinement, and polariton focusing, providing control over their propagation and achieving record-high in-plane confinement up to $\lambda/70$. Scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy reveals the real-space optical contrast of these cavity-launched modes, allowing for detailed characterization. We believe that our cavity-based approach to phonon-polariton focusing in isotropic media will pave the way for advanced nanophotonic applications.