Negative refraction in hyperbolic hetero-bicrystals
Aaron Sternbach, Samuel Moore, Andrey Rikhter, Shuai Zhang, Ran Jing, Yinming Shao, B. S. Y. Kim, Suheng Xu, S. Liu, James H. Edgar, Ángel Rubio, Cory R. Dean, James Hone, M. M. Fogler, D. N. Basov
Abstract
We visualized negative refraction of phonon polaritons, which occurs at the interface between two natural crystals. The polaritons—hybrids of infrared photons and lattice vibrations—form collimated rays that display negative refraction when passing through a planar interface between the two hyperbolic van der Waals materials: molybdenum oxide (MoO 3 ) and isotopically pure hexagonal boron nitride (h 11 BN). At a special frequency ω 0 , these rays can circulate along closed diamond-shaped trajectories. We have shown that polariton eigenmodes display regions of both positive and negative dispersion interrupted by multiple gaps that result from polaritonic-level repulsion and strong coupling.