Steering and cloaking of hyperbolic polaritons at deep-subwavelength scales

Polaritons are well-established carriers of light, electrical signals, and even heat at the nanoscale in the setting of on-chip devices. However, the goal of achieving practical polaritonic manipulation over small distances deeply below the light diffraction limit remains elusive. Here, we implement nanoscale polaritonic in-plane steering and cloaking in a low-loss atomically layered van der Waals (vdW) insulator, α-MoO3, comprising building blocks of customizable stacked and assembled structures. Each block contributes specific characteristics that allow us to steer polaritons along the desired trajectories. Our results introduce a natural materials-based approach for the comprehensive manipulation of nanoscale optical fields, advancing research in the vdW polaritonics domain and on-chip nanophotonic circuits.

Hanchao Teng, Na Chen, Hai Hu, F. Javier García de Abajo, Qing Dai