Near-field probing of image phonon-polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride on gold crystals
S. G. Menabde, S. Boroviks, J. Ahn, J. T. Heiden, K. Watanabe, T. Taniguchi, T. Low, D. K. Hwang, N. A. Mortensen and M. S. Jang
Science Advances 8, 28 (2022)
Near-field mapping has been widely used to study hyperbolic phonon-polaritons in van der Waals crystals. However, an accurate measurement of the polaritonic loss remains challenging because of the inherent complexity of the near-field signal and the substrate-mediated loss. Here we demonstrate that large-area monocrystalline gold flakes, an atomically flat low-loss substrate for image polaritons, provide a platform for precise near-field measurement of the complex propagation constant of polaritons in van der Waals crystals. As a topical example, we measure propagation loss of the image phonon-polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride, revealing that their normalized propagation length exhibits a parabolic spectral dependency. Furthermore, we show that image phonon-polaritons exhibit up to a twice longer normalized propagation length, while being 2.4 times more compressed compared to the case of the dielectric substrate. We conclude that the monocrystalline gold flakes provide a unique nanophotonic platform for probing and exploitation of the image modes in low-dimensional materials