Steering and cloaking of hyperbolic polaritons at deep-subwavelength scales.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38796473.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-48318-w and PMC identifier 11127984.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Polaritons are well-established carriers of light, electrical signals, and even heat at the nanoscale in the setting of on-chip devices. However, the goal of achieving practical polaritonic manipulation over small distances deeply below the light diffraction limit remains elusive. Here, we implement nanoscale polaritonic in-plane steering and cloaking in a low-loss atomically layered van der Waals (vdW) insulator, α-MoO<sub>3</sub>, comprising building blocks of customizable stacked and assembled structures. Each block contributes specific characteristics that allow us to steer polaritons along the desired trajectories. Our results introduce a natural materials-based approach for the comprehensive manipulation of nanoscale optical fields, advancing research in the vdW polaritonics domain and on-chip nanophotonic circuits.