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Published January 2019 | Published
Journal Article Open

Mimicking surface polaritons for unpolarized light with high-permittivity materials

Abstract

Tailoring near-field optical phenomena often requires excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) or surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs), surface waves at the interface between media with electric permittivities of opposite sign. Despite their unprecedented field confinement, surface polaritons are limited by polarization: only transverse magnetic fields enable their excitation, leaving transverse electric fields unexploited. By contrast, guided modes in positive permittivity materials occur for both linear polarizations, however, they typically cannot compete with SPPs and SPhPs in terms of confinement. Here we show that omnipolarization guided modes in materials with high-permittivity resonances can reach confinement factors similar to SPPs and SPhPs, while surpassing them in terms of propagation distance. We explore the cases of silicon carbide and transition-metal dichalcogenides near their permittivity resonances, and compare with SPhPs in silicon carbide and SPPs in silver, at infrared and visible frequencies, respectively.

Additional Information

© 2019 American Physical Society. Received 13 July 2018; revised manuscript received 9 October 2018; published 10 January 2019. This work was supported by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Grant No. DE-FG02-07ER46405 (G.T.P. and H.A.A.) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (A.R.D.) under Grant No. FA9550-16-1-0019. G.T.P. acknowledges support by the American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship and the TomKat Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainable Energy at Stanford University, and fruitful discussions with R. Pala.

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August 19, 2023
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October 20, 2023