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Soliton-dependent plasmon reflection at bilayer graphene domain walls

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 840–844 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Layer-stacking domain walls in bilayer graphene are emerging as a fascinating one-dimensional system1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 that features stacking solitons1,2,3,4 structurally and quantum valley Hall boundary states5,6,7,8,9,10,11 electronically. The interactions between electrons in the 2D graphene domains and the one-dimensional domain-wall solitons can lead to further new quantum phenomena. Domain-wall solitons of varied local structures exist along different crystallographic orientations1,2,12,13, which can exhibit distinct electrical, mechanical and optical properties. Here we report soliton-dependent 2D graphene plasmon reflection at different 1D domain-wall solitons in bilayer graphene using near-field infrared nanoscopy. We observe various domain-wall structures in mechanically exfoliated graphene bilayers, including network-forming triangular lattices, individual straight or bent lines, and even closed circles. The near-field infrared contrast of domain-wall solitons arises from plasmon reflection at domain walls, and exhibits markedly different behaviours at the tensile- and shear-type domain-wall solitons. In addition, the plasmon reflection at domain walls exhibits a peculiar dependence on electrostatic gating. Our study demonstrates the unusual and tunable coupling between 2D graphene plasmons and domain-wall solitons.

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Figure 1: Nano-imaging of domain walls in bilayer graphene using the near-field infrared nanoscopy technique.
Figure 2: Near-field infrared images of a rich variety of bilayer graphene domain-wall structures.
Figure 3: Gate-dependent surface plasmon reflection at domain-wall solitons.
Figure 4: Plasmon reflectance and phase at the shear and tensile domain walls.

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Acknowledgements

The near-field infrared nanoscopy measurements and plasmon analysis are supported by the Office of Basic Energy Science, Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 (Sub-wavelength Metamaterial programme). The bilayer graphene domain-wall sample preparation and characterization are supported by the Office of Naval Research award No. N00014-15-1-2651 (device fabrication and characterization) and the National Science Foundation award No. DMR-1206512 (sample preparation). L.Jiang acknowledges support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. T.J. acknowledges support from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE 1106400.

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Author notes

  1. Lili Jiang and Zhiwen Shi: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Lili Jiang, Zhiwen Shi, Bo Zeng, Sheng Wang, Ji-Hun Kang, Trinity Joshi, Chenhao Jin, Long Ju, Jonghwan Kim, Yuen-Ron Shen, Michael Crommie & Feng Wang

  2. Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

    Lili Jiang & Hong-Jun Gao

  3. Physics Department, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

    Tairu Lyu

  4. Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Yuen-Ron Shen, Michael Crommie & Feng Wang

  5. Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Michael Crommie & Feng Wang

Authors
  1. Lili Jiang
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Contributions

F.W. and Z.S. conceived the project. L.Jiang, Z.S., T.J., B.Z. and L.Ju performed the near-field infrared measurements. C.J. and J.K. prepared the samples. L.Jiang, Z.S., S.W., J.-H.K., T.L. and F.W. analyse the data. All authors discussed the results and contributed to writing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Feng Wang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Jiang, L., Shi, Z., Zeng, B. et al. Soliton-dependent plasmon reflection at bilayer graphene domain walls. Nature Mater 15, 840–844 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4653

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