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Extreme light confinement and control in low-symmetry phonon-polaritonic crystals

Nature Reviews Materials volume 9, pages 9–28 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Polaritons are a hybrid class of quasiparticles originating from the strong and resonant coupling between light and matter excitations. Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in new polariton types, arising from directional, long-lived material resonances, and leading to extreme optical anisotropy that enables new regimes of nanoscale, highly confined light propagation. Although such exotic propagation features may also in principle be achieved by using carefully designed metamaterials, it has recently been realized that they can naturally emerge when coupling infrared light to directional lattice vibrations — phonons — in polar crystals. Interestingly, a reduction in crystal symmetry increases the directionality of optical phonons and the resulting anisotropy of the response, which in turn enables new polaritonic phenomena, such as hyperbolic polaritons with highly directional propagation, ghost polaritons with complex-valued wavevectors, and shear polaritons with strongly asymmetric propagation features. In this Review, we develop a critical overview of recent advances in the discovery of phonon polaritons in low-symmetry crystals, highlighting the role of broken symmetries in dictating the polariton response and associated nanoscale light propagation features. We also discuss emerging opportunities for polaritons in lower-symmetry materials and metamaterials, with connections to topological physics and the possibility of using anisotropic nonlinearities and optical pumping to further control their nanoscale response.

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Fig. 1: Structural and optical symmetry breaking in polar crystals.
Fig. 2: Out-of-plane hyperbolicity in uniaxial crystals: volume-hyperbolic phonon polaritons in hBN.
Fig. 3: Surface anisotropy in off-cut crystals: ghost polaritons and leaky polaritons.
Fig. 4: Phonon polaritons in orthorhombic crystals with biaxial optical response.
Fig. 5: Axial dispersion and shear in monoclinic crystals.
Fig. 6: Twist-optics: controlling the propagation of PhPs with twisted bilayer and trilayer vdW stacks.
Fig. 7: Low-symmetry metacrystals.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank C. Carbogno (FHI Berlin) for computing the displacement vectors of the relevant phonon modes shown in Fig. 1. A.A., E.G., X.N., S.Y., E.M.R. and R.N. were partially supported by the Simons Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research with MURI grants no. FA9550-18-1-0379 and FA9550-22-1-0317, and the Office of Naval Research with grant no. N00014-19-1-2011. E.G. acknowledges funding from the Simons Foundation through a Junior Fellowship of the Simons Society of Fellows. G.C., S.W., M.W. and A.P. acknowledge support by the Max Planck Society. G.Á.-P. acknowledges support through the Severo Ochoa programme from the Government of the Principality of Asturias (grant no. PA-20-PF-BP19-053). P.A.-G. acknowledges support from the European Research Council under Consolidator grant no. 101044461, TWISTOPTICS and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation grant number PID2022-141304NB-I00).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Emanuele Galiffi, Giulia Carini, Xiang Ni.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Science Research Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Emanuele Galiffi, Simon Yves, Enrico Maria Renzi, Ryan Nolen & Andrea Alù

  2. Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany

    Giulia Carini, Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez, Sören Wasserroth, Martin Wolf & Alexander Paarmann

  3. School of Physics, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China

    Xiang Ni

  4. Department of Physics, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez & Pablo Alonso-Gonzalez

  5. Center of Research on Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology, CINN (CSIC-Universidad de Oviedo), El Entrego, Spain

    Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez & Pablo Alonso-Gonzalez

  6. Physics Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Enrico Maria Renzi & Andrea Alù

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Contributions

E.G., G.C. and X.N. contributed equally to the article. All authors contributed substantially to the discussion of the content. A.A. initiated the project. E.G., G.C, X.N., G.Á.-P., P.A.-G., S.Y., E.M.R. and A.P. researched the data and wrote the respective sections of the article. E.G., G.C., X.N., G.Á.-P., E.M.R., S.Y., A.P. and A.A. reviewed and edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Alexander Paarmann or Andrea Alù.

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Galiffi, E., Carini, G., Ni, X. et al. Extreme light confinement and control in low-symmetry phonon-polaritonic crystals. Nat Rev Mater 9, 9–28 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-023-00620-7

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