Strong two-dimensional plasmon in Li-intercalated hexagonal boron-nitride film with low damping

Abstract

The field of plasmonics seeks to find materials with an intensive plasmon (large plasmon pole weight) with low Landau, phonon, and other losses (small decay width). In this paper, we propose a new class of materials that show exceptionally good plasmonic properties. These materials consist of van der Waals stacked “plasmon active” layers (atomically thin metallic layers) and “supporting” layers (atomically thin wide band gap insulating layers). One such material that can be experimentally realized—lithium intercalated hexagonal boron-nitride is studied in detail. We show that its 2D plasmon intensity is superior to the intensity of well-studied Dirac plasmon in heavy doped graphene, which is hard to achieve. We also propose a method for computationally very cheap, but accurate analysis of plasmon spectra in such materials, based on one band tight-binding approach and effective background dielectric function.