After a long-term quest, a research group led by professor Wei Cai and professor Jingjun Xu from the School of Physics at Nankai University has achieved a series of progress in nano-scale light manipulation, such as the nano-scale detection of the optical properties of bilayer graphene with independent regulation of energy band and Fermi level (Nano Letters 21, 5151 (2021)) and controllable adjustment of the reflection of graphene plasmon wave by artificially induced electronic boundary (Advanced Materials, 29, 1701083 (2017)).
Recently, based on the acoustic graphene plasmons with ultrahigh field localization in single-layer graphene/boron nitride/gold triple-layer structure, the team observed that the mid-infrared light would be strongly in-plane scattered by the atomic scale undulating structure under the condition thatthe characteristic structure size is about three orders of magnitude smaller than the incident wavelength of the light, and further realized the regulation by changing the gate voltage. The physical mechanism of the project is derived from the ultra-high electric filed localization properties of acoustic graphene plasmon, which could realize the compression of the mid-infrared wavelength around 100 times. This research has great significance for the manipulation of light using nano-structures in atomic scale. The research result was published online in the international journal Nature Communications entitled “Strong in-plane scattering of acoustic graphene plasmons by surface atomic steps.
Nankai University is the first affiliation of the paper. Ni Zhang, Ph.D. student of Nankai University, Weiwei Luo, associate professor of Nankai University, and Lei Wang, associate professor of Xinyang Normal University (Ph.D. graduate of Nankai University) are the co-first authors of it. Professor Wei Cai and Professor Jingjun Xu of Nankai University are co-corresponding authors. The project is supported by the Major Project of Basic Research and Applied Basic Research Program of Guangdong Province, the Key R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The Paper Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28614-z
