Good plasmons in a bad metal
Correlated metals may exhibit unusually high resistivity that increases linearly in temperature, breaking through the Mott-Ioffe-Regel bound, above which coherent quasiparticles are destroyed. The fate of collective charge excitations, or plasmons, in these systems is a subject of debate. Several studies have suggested that plasmons are overdamped, whereas other studies have detected propagating plasmons. In this work, we present direct nano-optical images of low-loss hyperbolic plasmon polaritons (HPPs) in the correlated van der Waals metal MoOCl<sub>2</sub>. HPPs are plasmon-photon modes that waveguide through extremely anisotropic media and are remarkably long-lived in MoOCl<sub>2</sub>. Photoemission data presented here reveal a highly anisotropic Fermi surface, reconstructed and made partly incoherent, likely through electronic interactions as explained by many-body theory. HPPs remain long-lived despite this, revealing previously unseen imprints of many-body effects on plasmonic collective modes.
Authors
- Sae Hee Ryu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3207-7582)
- Yinming Shao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2891-0028)
- Mark van Schilfgaarde (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1210-4459)
- James G. Analytis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7657-7688)
- Eli Rotenberg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3979-8844)
- Swagata Acharya (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8074-0030)
- Daria A. Balatsky (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6802-731X)
- D. N. Basov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9785-5387)
- Francesco L. Ruta (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8746-9420)
- M. I. Katsnelson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5165-7553)
- Dimitar Pashov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4292-9745)
- Na Hyun Jo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4065-6429)
- Brian S. Y. Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3024-4220)
- Anqi Mu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3284-5759)
- Andrew J. Millis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9413-6344)
- Yifan Su (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2395-3053)
Institutions
- National Laboratory of the Rockies (US)
- Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- King's College London (GB)
- University of Colorado Boulder (US)
- University of Michigan (US)
- Radboud University Medical Center (NL)
- Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences (NL)
- Canadian Quantum Research Center (CA)
- Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (US)
- Flatiron Health (United States) (US)
- Flatiron Institute (US)
- Columbia University (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Science
- Published
- 2025-02-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adr5926
- Citations
- 26
- Primary Topic
- Plasmonic and Surface Plasmon Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 17.53
Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy