Probing the ultimate plasmon confinement limits with a van der Waals heterostructure

Abstract

Light confined to a single atomic layer The development of nanophotonic technology is reliant on the ability to confine light to spatial dimensions much less than the wavelength of the light itself. Typically, however, in metal plasmonic approaches, there is a trade-off between confinement and losses. Alcaraz Iranzo et al. fabricated heterostructures comprising monolayers of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and an array of metallic rods. The light was confined vertically (as propagating plasmons) between the metal and the graphene, even when the insulating hBN spacer was just a single monolayer. Such heterostructures should provide a powerful and versatile platform for nanophotonics. Science , this issue p. 291