Electrically tunable interband collective excitations in biased bilayer and trilayer graphene

Abstract

Collective excitations of charged particles under the influence of an electromagnetic field give rise to a rich variety of hybrid light-matter quasiparticles with unique properties. In metals, intraband collective response manifested by negative permittivity leads to plasmon polaritons with extreme field confinement, wavelength “squeezing,” and potentially low propagation losses. In contrast, photons in semiconductors commonly couple to interband collective response in the form of exciton polaritons, which give rise to completely different polaritonic properties, described by a superposition of the photon and exciton and an anti-crossing of the eigenstates. In this work, we identify the existence of plasmon-like collective excitations originating from the interband excitonic response of biased bilayer and trilayer graphene, in the form of graphene exciton polaritons (GEPs). We find that GEPs possess electrically tunable polaritonic properties and discover that such excitations follow a universal dispersion law for all surface polaritons in 2D excitonic systems. Accounting for nonlocal corrections to the excitonic response, we find that the GEPs exhibit confinement factors that can exceed those of graphene plasmons, and with moderate losses that would enable their observation in cryo-SNOM experiments. These predictions of plasmon-like interband collective excitations in biased graphene systems open up new research avenues for tunable plasmonic phenomena based on excitonic systems, and the ability to control and manipulate such phenomena at the atomic scale.