Good plasmons in a bad metal.

Abstract

Correlated metals may exhibit unusually high resistivity that increases linearly in temperature, breaking through the Mott-Ioffe-Regel bound, above which coherent quasiparticles are destroyed. The fate of collective charge excitations, or plasmons, in these systems is a subject of debate. Several studies have suggested that plasmons are overdamped, whereas other studies have detected propagating plasmons. In this work, we present direct nano-optical images of low-loss hyperbolic plasmon polaritons (HPPs) in the correlated van der Waals metal MoOCl₂. HPPs are plasmon-photon modes that waveguide through extremely anisotropic media and are remarkably long-lived in MoOCl₂. Photoemission data presented here reveal a highly anisotropic Fermi surface, reconstructed and made partly incoherent, likely through electronic interactions as explained by many-body theory. HPPs remain long-lived despite this, revealing previously unseen imprints of many-body effects on plasmonic collective modes.