In-plane plasmon coupling in topological insulator Bi₂Se₃ thin films

The surface states of the 3D topological insulator (TI), Bi₂Se₃, are known to host two-dimensional Dirac plasmon polaritons (DPPs) in the terahertz spectral range. In TI thin films, the DPPs excited on the top and bottom surfaces couple, leading to an acoustic mode and an optical plasmon mode. Vertical coupling in these materials is, therefore, reasonably well-understood, but in-plane coupling among localized TI DPPs has yet to be investigated. In this paper, we demonstrate in-plane DPP coupling in TI stripe arrays and show that they exhibit dipole–dipole type coupling. Here, the coupling becomes negligible when the lattice constant is greater than approximately 2.8 times the stripe width, which is comparable to results for in-plane coupling of localized plasmons excited on metallic nanoparticles or graphene plasmon polaritons. This understanding could be leveraged for the creation of TI-based metasurfaces.