Phonon polaritons and polarons

Controlling light down to the nanoscale is a huge challenge, especially because the wavelength of exceeds by orders of magnitude the interatomic distances. Phonon polaritons, the interaction of light with lattice vibrations, have allowed to confine infrared light at the atomic scale with an unprecedented lifetime in layered anisotropic materials. This opens the possibility of engineering outstanding optical devices.

In our group we work on calculating from first principles the dielectric properties of materials in the infrared, with the aim at characterizing the optical properties of these materials.

People involved in this line of research

  • Ion Errea

    Ion Errea

    Group leader

  • Florette Fobasso

    Postdoc
Meet all the team

Publications in this research line

Real-space observation of ultraconfined in-plane anisotropic acoustic terahertz plasmon polaritons

S. Chen, P. L. Leng, A. Konečná, Martin Gutierrez-Amigo, E. Vicentini, B. Martín-García, M. Barra-Burillo, I. Niehues, C. Maciel Escudero, X. Y. Xie, L. E. Hueso, E. Artacho, J. Aizpurua, Ion Errea, Maia G. Vergniory, A. Chuvilin, F. X. Xiu and Rainer Hillenbrand
Nature Materials 22, 860 (2023)

Nanoscale-Confined Terahertz Polaritons in a van der Waals Crystal

Thales V. A. G. de Oliveira, Töbias Norenberg, Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez, Lukas Wehmeier, Javier Taboada-Gutiérrez, Maximilian Obst, Franz Hempel, Eduardo J. H. Lee, J. Michael Klopf, Ion Errea, Alexey Y. Nikitin, Susanne C. Kehr, Pablo Alonso-González and Lukas M. Eng
Advanced Materials 33, 2005777 (2021)

Infrared Permittivity of the Biaxial van der Waals Semiconductor α-MoO3 from Near- and Far-Field Correlative Studies

Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez, Thomas G. Folland, Ion Errea, Javier Taboada-Gutiérrez, Jiahua Duan, Javier Martín-Sánchez, Ana I. F. Tresguerres-Mata, Joseph R. Matson, Andrei Bylinkin, Mingze He, Weiliang Ma, Qiaoliang Bao, José Ignacio Martín, Joshua D. Caldwell, Alexey Y. Nikitin and Pablo Alonso-González
Advanced Materials 32, 1908176 (2020)

Broad spectral tuning of ultra-low-loss polaritons in a van der Waals crystal by intercalation.

Javier Taboada-Gutiérrez, Gonzalo Álvarez-Pérez, Jiahua Duan, Weiliang Ma, Kyle Crowley, Iván Prieto, Andrei Bylinkin, Marta Autore, Halyna Volkova, Kenta Kimura, Tsuyoshi Kimura, M.-H. Berger, Shaojuan Li, Qiaoliang Bao, Xuan P. A. Gao, Ion Errea, Alexey Y. Nikitin, Rainer Hillenbrand, Javier Martín-Sánchez and Pablo Alonso-González
Nature Materials 19, 964 (2020)