Speaker
Niclas Mueller
(Fritz Haber Institute, PC Department)
Description
Phonon polaritons are hybrid light-matter particles in solid-state materials that enable waveguiding of light on length scales much smaller than the photon wavelength. Here, we introduce HfSe$_2$ as a new van der Waals material that supports phonon polaritons in the terahertz (THz) spectral range. We image the propagation of these polaritons with a near-field optical microscope that is attached to a free-electron laser. The phonon polaritons of thin material films enable an extreme confinement of light from 61 μm free-space wavelength to 245 nm. Through a combination of experiments and simulations, we show that the origin of this record-high confinement is an exceptionally large light-matter coupling of HfSe$_2$ and its optical anisotropy.
Primary author
Niclas Mueller
(Fritz Haber Institute, PC Department)
Co-authors
Ryan Kowalski
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez
(University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain)
Maximilian Obst
(TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany)
Katja Granados
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
Giulia Carini
(Fritz Haber Institute, PC Department)
Aditha Senarath
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
Saurabh Dixit
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
Richarda Niemann
(Fritz Haber Institute, PC Department)
Raghunandan Iyer
(The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA)
Felix Kaps
(TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany)
Jakob Wetzel
(TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany)
John Michael Klopf
(Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Dresden, Germany)
Ivan I. Kravchenko
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA)
Deliang Bao
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
Sokrates T. Pantelides
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
Martin Wolf
(Fritz Haber Institute, PC Department)
Lukas Eng
(TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany)
Pablo Alonso-González
(University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain)
Susanne Kehr
(TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany)
Thomas G. Folland
(The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA)
Alex Paarmann
(Fritz Haber Institute, PC Department)
Joshua D. Caldwell
(Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA)
