Title
Mechanical Detection and Imaging of Hyperbolic Phonon Polaritons in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
Date Issued
26 September 2017
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Ambrosio A.
Dai S.
Chaudhary K.
Tamagnone M.
Fogler M.M.
Basov D.N.
Capasso F.
Kim P.
Wilson W.L.
Harvard University
Publisher(s)
American Chemical Society
Abstract
Mid-infrared nanoimaging and spectroscopy of two-dimensional (2D) materials have been limited so far to scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) experiments, where light from the sample is scattered by a metallic-coated atomic force microscope (AFM) tip interacting with the material at the nanoscale. These experiments have recently allowed imaging of plasmon polaritons in graphene as well as hyperbolic phonon polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Here we show that the high mechanical sensitivity of an AFM cantilever can be exploited for imaging hyperbolic phonon polaritons in hBN. In our imaging process, the lattice vibrations of hBN micrometer-sized flakes are locally enhanced by the launched phonon polaritons. These enhanced vibrations are coupled to the AFM tip in contact with the sample surface and recorded during scanning. Imaging resolution of Δ/20 is shown (Δ being the polaritonic fringes' separation distance), comparable to the best resolution in s-SNOM. Importantly, this detection mechanism is free from light background, and it is in fact the first photonless detection of phonon polaritons.
Start page
8741
End page
8746
Volume
11
Issue
9
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Física atómica, molecular y química
Nano-procesos
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85029958278
PubMed ID
Source
ACS Nano
ISSN of the container
19360851
Sponsor(s)
This work was performed in part at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF award no. 1541959. CNS is a part of Harvard University. S.N.D., M.F., and D.N.B. are supported by ONR N00014-15-1-2671. D.N.B. is the Moore Investigator in Quantum Materials EPIQS program GBMF4533. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation EFRI 2-DARE program through grant no. 1542807. M.T. acknowledges the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) grant no. 168545.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus