Control polaritons by patterning the 3D environment of a 2D material

An important, yet sometimes understated, property of 2D materials is that they are embedded in a 3D environment, which makes them amenable to external manipulation in ways in which 3D materials are not. In this talk, I will demonstrate how this concept can be applied to confine hyperbolic phonon polaritons volumes 8 orders of magnitude smaller than the volume of a vacuum photon (λ₀³), while still maintaining an appreciable quality factor (Q~100). This breaks away from the nanophotonics paradigm that deep subwavelength  cavities always exhibit low quality factors (high absorption). These new cavities pave the way to exciting cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments, novel multimodal interaction effects and Floquet driving physics.