We explore the far-field scattering properties of anisotropic 2D materials in ribbon array configuration. Our study reveals the plasmon-enhanced linear birefringence in these ultrathin metasurfaces, where linearly polarized incident light can be scattered into its orthogonal polarization or be converted into circular polarized light. We found wide modulation in both amplitude and phase of the scattered light via tuning the operating frequency or materials anisotropy and develop models to explain the observed scattering behavior.
A uniaxial strain applied to graphene-like materials moves the Dirac nodes along the boundary of the Brillouin zone. An extreme case is the merging of the Dirac node positions to a single degenerate spectral node which gives rise to a new topological phase. Then isotropic Dirac nodes are replaced by a node with a linear behavior in one and a parabolic behavior in the other direction. This anisotropy influences substantially the optical properties. We propose a method to determine characteristic spectral and transport properties in black phosphorus layers which were recently studied by several groups with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, and discuss how the transmittance, the reflectance and the optical absorption of this material can be tuned. In particular, we demonstrate that the transmittance of linearly polarized incident light varies from nearly 0% to almost 100% in the microwave and far-infrared regime.
Motivated by the recent emergence of a new class of anisotropic 2D materials, we examine their electromagnetic modes and demonstrate that a broad class of the materials can host highly directional hyperbolic plasmons. Their propagation direction can be manipulated on-the-spot by gate doping, enabling hyperbolic beams reflection, refraction and bending. The realization of these natural 2D hyperbolic media opens up a new avenue in dynamic control of hyperbolic plasmons not possible in the 3D version.
We reveal new aspects of the interaction between plasmons and phonons in 2D materials that go beyond a mere shift and increase in plasmon width due to coupling to either intrinsic vibrational modes of the material or phonons in a supporting substrate. More precisely, we predict strong plasmon splitting due to this coupling, resulting in a characteristic avoided crossing scheme. We base our results on a computationally efficient approach consisting in including many-body interactions through the electron self-energy. We specify this formalism for a description of plasmons based upon a tight-binding electron Hamiltonian combined with the random-phase approximation. This approach is accurate provided vertex corrections can be neglected, as is is the case in conventional plasmon-supporting metals and Dirac-fermion systems. We illustrate our method by evaluating plasmonic spectra of doped graphene nanotriangles with varied size, where we predict remarkable peak splittings and other radical modifications in the spectra due to plasmons interactions with intrinsic optical phonons. Our method is equally applicable to other 2D materials and provides a simple approach for investigating coupling of plasmons to phonons, excitons, and other excitations in hybrid thin nanostructures.
Low-symmetry 2D materials---such as ReS$_2$ and ReSe$_2$ monolayers, black phosphorus monolayers, group-IV monochalcogenide monolayers, borophene, among others---have more complex atomistic structures than the honeycomb lattices of graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, and transition metal dichalcogenides. The reduced symmetries of these emerging materials give rise to inhomogeneous electron, optical, valley, and spin responses, as well as entirely new properties such as ferroelasticity, ferroelectricity, magnetism, spin-wave phenomena, large nonlinear optical properties, photogalvanic effects, and superconductivity. Novel electronic topological properties, nonlinear elastic properties, and structural phase transformations can also take place due to low symmetry. The Beyond Graphene: Low-Symmetry and Anisotropic 2D Materials Special Topic was assembled to highlight recent experimental and theoretical research on these emerging materials.
In the effort to make 2D materials-based devices smaller, faster, and more efficient, it is important to control charge carrier at lengths approaching the nanometer scale. Traditional gating techniques based on capacitive coupling through a gate dielectric cannot generate strong and uniform electric fields at this scale due to divergence of the fields in dielectrics. This field divergence limits the gating strength, boundary sharpness, and pitch size of periodic structures, and restricts possible geometries of local gates (due to wire packaging), precluding certain device concepts, such as plasmonics and transformation optics based on metamaterials. Here we present a new gating concept based on a dielectric-free self-aligned electrolyte technique that allows spatially modulating charges with nanometer resolution. We employ a combination of a solid-polymer electrolyte gate and an ion-impenetrable e-beam-defined resist mask to locally create excess charges on top of the gated surface. Electrostatic simulations indicate high carrier density variations of $Delta n =10^{14}text{cm}^{-2}$ across a length of 10 nm at the mask boundaries on the surface of a 2D conductor, resulting in a sharp depletion region and a strong in-plane electric field of $6times10^8 text{Vm}^{-1}$ across the so-created junction. We apply this technique to the 2D material graphene to demonstrate the creation of tunable p-n junctions for optoelectronic applications. We also demonstrate the spatial versatility and self-aligned properties of this technique by introducing a novel graphene thermopile photodetector.