Probing optical anisotropy of nanometer-thin van der waals microcrystals by near-field imaging

Debo Hu, Xiaoxia Yang, Chi Li, Ruina Liu, Ziheng Yao, Hai Hu, Stephanie N. Gilbert Corder, Jianing Chen, Zhipei Sun, Mengkun Liu () and Qing Dai ()
Additional contact information
Debo Hu: National Center for Nanoscience and Technology
Xiaoxia Yang: National Center for Nanoscience and Technology
Chi Li: National Center for Nanoscience and Technology
Ruina Liu: National Center for Nanoscience and Technology
Ziheng Yao: Stony Brook University
Hai Hu: National Center for Nanoscience and Technology
Stephanie N. Gilbert Corder: Stony Brook University
Jianing Chen: Chinese Academy of Science
Zhipei Sun: Aalto University
Mengkun Liu: Stony Brook University
Qing Dai: National Center for Nanoscience and Technology

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Most van der Waals crystals present highly anisotropic optical responses due to their strong in-plane covalent bonding and weak out-of-plane interactions. However, the determination of the polarization-dependent dielectric constants of van der Waals crystals remains a nontrivial task, since the size and dimension of the samples are often below or close to the diffraction limit of the probe light. In this work, we apply an optical nano-imaging technique to determine the anisotropic dielectric constants in representative van der Waals crystals. Through the study of both ordinary and extraordinary waveguide modes in real space, we are able to quantitatively determine the full dielectric tensors of nanometer-thin molybdenum disulfide and hexagonal boron nitride microcrystals, the most-promising van der Waals semiconductor and dielectric. Unlike traditional reflection-based methods, our measurements are reliable below the length scale of the free-space wavelength and reveal a universal route for characterizing low-dimensional crystals with high anisotropies.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01580-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-01580-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01580-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().