Alkali Intercalation of Moire Heterostructures for Low-Loss Plasmonics

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel class of Moire heterostructures with alkali intercalation, specifically sodium, that support low-loss plasmons at around 1 eV, overcoming typical material limitations for plasmonic applications.

Contribution

It introduces alkali-intercalated Moire heterostructures as a new platform for low-loss, high-frequency plasmons, with detailed analysis of electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions.

Findings

Sodium intercalation creates isolated bands supporting lossless plasmons at first order.

Electron-phonon decay is negligible at ~1 eV frequencies, with decay rates around 10^7 Hz.

Electron-electron interactions dominate plasmon decay, with rates around 10^14 Hz.

Abstract

Two-dimensional metals generically support gapless plasmons with wavelengths well below the wavelength of free-space radiation at the same frequency. Typically, however, this substantial confinement of electromagnetic energy is associated with commensurately high losses, and mitigating such losses may only be achieved through judicious band structure engineering near the Fermi level. In a clean system, an isolated, moderately flat, band at the Fermi level with sufficiently high carrier density can support a plasmon that is immune to propagation losses up to some order in the electron-phonon interaction. However, proposed materials that satisfy these criteria have been ferromagnetic, structurally unstable, or otherwise difficult to fabricate. Here, we propose a class of band structure engineered materials that evade these typical pitfalls -- Moire heterostructures of hexagonal boron nitride intercalated with alkali atoms. We find that only sodium atoms engender a sufficiently isolated band with plasmons lossless at first order in the electron-phonon interaction. We calculate higher order electron-phonon losses and find that at frequencies of about $1$eV the electron-phonon decay mechanism is negligible -- leading to a contribution to the decay rate of about 10^7 Hz in a small frequency range. We next calculate losses from the electron-electron interaction and find that this is the dominant process -- leading plasmons to decay to lower frequency plasmons at a rate of around 10^14 Hz.