Surface plasmon in a two-dimensional Anderson insulator with interactions

Chiral Plasmons with Twisted Atomic Bilayers

van der Waals heterostructures of atomically thin layers with rotational misalignments, such as twisted bilayer graphene, feature interesting structural moiré superlattices. Because of the quantum coupling between the twisted atomic layers, light-matter interaction is inherently chiral; as such, they provide a promising platform for chiral plasmons in the extreme nanoscale. However, while the interlayer quantum coupling can be significant, its influence on chiral plasmons still remains elusive. Here we present the general solutions from full Maxwell equations of chiral plasmons in twisted atomic bilayers, with the consideration of interlayer quantum coupling. We find twisted atomic bilayers have a direct correspondence to the chiral metasurface, which simultaneously possesses chiral and magnetic surface conductivities, besides the common electric surface conductivity. In other words, the interlayer quantum coupling in twisted van der Waals heterostructures may facilitate the construction of various (e.g., bi-anisotropic) atomically-thin metasurfaces. Moreover, the chiral surface conductivity, determined by the interlayer quantum coupling, determines the existence of chiral plasmons and leads to a unique phase relationship (i.e., ±π/2 phase difference) between their transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) wave components. Importantly, such a unique phase relationship for chiral plasmons can be exploited to construct the missing longitudinal spin of plasmons, besides the common transverse spin of plasmons.

Tunable Intrinsic Plasmons due to Band Inversion in Topological Materials

Band inversion has led to rich physical effects in both topological insulators and topological semimetals. It has been found that the inverted band structure with the Mexican-hat dispersion could enhance the interband correlation leading to a strong intrinsic plasmon excitation. Its frequency ranges from several meV to tens of meV and can be effectively tuned by the external fields. The electron-hole asymmetric term splits the peak of the plasmon excitation into double peaks. The fate and properties of this plasmon excitation can also act as a probe to characterize the topological phases even in lightly doped systems. We numerically demonstrate the impact of band inversion on plasmon excitations in magnetically doped thin films of three-dimensional strong topological insulators, V- or Cr-doped (Bi,Sb)_{2}Te_{3}, which support the quantum anomalous Hall states. Our work thus sheds some new light on the potential applications of topological materials in plasmonics.

Charge response function and a novel plasmon mode in graphene

Polarizability of noninteracting 2D Dirac electrons has a 1/square root(qv-omega) singularity at the boundary of electron-hole excitations. The screening of this singularity by long-range electron-electron interactions is usually treated within the random phase approximation. The latter is exact only in the limit of N-->infinity, where N is the "color" degeneracy. We find that the ladder-type vertex corrections become crucial close to the threshold as the ratio of the nth order ladder term to the same order random phase approximation contribution is ln(n)|qv-omega|/N(n). We perform an analytical summation of the infinite series of ladder diagrams which describe the excitonic effect. Beyond the threshold, qv>omega, the real part of the polarization operator is found to be positive leading to the appearance of a strong and narrow plasmon resonance.

Hot-electron effects in two-dimensional hopping with a large localization length

We have studied nonlinear effects in the resistance of a two-dimensional system with a large localization length on both sides of the crossover from weak to strong localization. It is shown that nonlinearity in the hopping regime is due to electron overheating rather than the field effects. This qualitatively new behavior is a signature of a two-dimensional hopping transport with a large localization length.