Modification of surface and volume of sapphire is shown to affect reflected and transmitted light at THz spectral range. Structural modifications were made using ultra-short 230 fs laser pulses at 1030 nm and 257.5 nm wavelengths forming surface ripples of ~250 nm and 60 nm period, respectively. Softening of the transverse optical phonon TO1 mode due to disorder was the most pronounced in reflection from laser ablated surface. It is shown that sub-surface periodic patterns of laser damage sites have also modified reflection spectrum due to coupling of THz radiation with phonons. Application potential of laser structuring and disordering for phononic engineering is discussed.
A superconducting metasurface operating in the THz range and based on the complementary metamaterial approach is discussed. Experimental measurements as a function of temperature and magnetic field display a modulation of the metasurface with a change in transmission amplitude and frequency of the resonant features. Such a metasurface is successively used as a resonator for a cavity quantum electrodynamic experiment displaying ultrastrong coupling to the cyclotron transition of a 2DEG. A finite element modeling is developed and its results are in good agreement with the experimental data. In this system a normalized coupling ratio of $frac{Omega}{omega_c}=0.27$ is measured and a clear modulation of the polaritonic states as a function of the temperature is observed.
Strong interactions between surface plasmons in ultra-compact nanocavities and excitons in two dimensional materials have attracted wide interests for its prospective realization of polariton devices at room temperature. Here, we propose a continuous transition from weak coupling to strong coupling between excitons in MoS2 monolayer and highly localized plasmons in ultra-compact nanoantenna. The nanoantenna is assembled by a silver nanocube positioned over a gold film and separated by a dielectric spacer layer. We observed a 1570-fold enhancement in the photoluminescence at weak coupling regime in hybrid nanocavities with thick spacer layers. The interaction between excitons and plasmons is then directly prompted to strong coupling regime by shrinking down the thickness of spacer layer. Room temperature formation of polaritons with Rabi splitting up to 190 meV was observed, which is the largest plasmon-exciton Rabi splitting reported in two dimensional materials. Numerical calculations quantified the relation between coupling strength, local density of states and spacer thickness, and revealed the transition between weak coupling and strong coupling in nanocavities. The findings in this work offer a guideline for feasible designs of plasmon-exciton interaction systems with gap plasmonic cavities.
We present a combined experimental and theoretical study of the surface vibrational modes of the topological insulator (TI) Bi$_2$Se$_3$ with particular emphasis on the low-energy region below 10 meV that has been difficult to resolve experimentally. By applying inelastic helium atom scattering (HAS), the entire phonon dispersion was determined and compared with density functional perturbation theory (DFPT) calculations. The intensity of the phonon modes is dominated by a strong Rayleigh mode, in contrast to previous experimental works. Moreover, also at variance with recent reports, no Kohn-anomaly is observed. These observations are in excellent agreement with DFPT calculations. Besides these results, the experimental data reveal$-$via bound-state resonance enhancement$-$two additional dispersion curves in the gap below the Rayleigh mode. They are possibly associated with an excitation of a surface electron density superstructure that we observe in HAS diffraction patterns. The electron-phonon coupling paramenter $lambda$ = 0.23 derived from our temperature dependent Debye-Waller measurements compares well with values determined by angular resolved photoemission or Landau level spectroscopy. Our work opens up a new perspective for THz measurements on 2D materials as well as the investigation of subtle details (band bending, the presence of quantum well states) with respect to the electron-phonon coupling.
We study the topological edge plasmon modes between two diatomic chains of identical plasmonic nanoparticles. Zak phase for longitudinal plasmon modes in each chain is calculated analytically by solutions of macroscopic Maxwells equations for particles in quasi-static dipole approximation. This approximation provides a direct analogy with the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model such that the eigenvalue is mapped to the frequency dependent inverse-polarizability of the nanoparticles. The edge state frequency is found to be the same as the single-particle resonance frequency, which is insensitive to the separation distances within a unit cell. Finally, full electrodynamic simulations with realistic parameters suggest that the edge plasmon mode can be realized through near-field optical spectroscopy.
The ultra-strong light-matter coupling regime has been demonstrated in a novel three-dimensional inductor-capacitor (LC) circuit resonator, embedding a semiconductor two-dimensional electron gas in the capacitive part. The fundamental resonance of the LC circuit interacts with the intersubband plasmon excitation of the electron gas at $omega_c = 3.3$~THz with a normalized coupling strength $2Omega_R/omega_c = 0.27$. Light matter interaction is driven by the quasi-static electric field in the capacitors, and takes place in a highly subwavelength effective volume $V_{mathrm{eff}} = 10^{-6}lambda_0^3$ . This enables the observation of the ultra-strong light-matter coupling with $2.4times10^3$ electrons only. Notably, our fabrication protocol can be applied to the integration of a semiconductor region into arbitrary nano-engineered three dimensional meta-atoms. This circuit architecture can be considered the building block of metamaterials for ultra-low dark current detectors.