Graphene-covered hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) can exceed blackbody thermal radiation in near-field due to the coupling of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPPs). As previous research found that the thickness of hBN in a graphene-hBN cell can be very thin while still presenting strong radiation enhancement, multilayer graphene-hBN heterostructures are proposed in this paper to further enhance the near-field thermal radiation. We found that a heterostructure consisting of five or more graphene-hBN cells performs better than all existing graphene-hBN configurations, and the infinite cell limit exhibits 1.87- and 2.94-fold larger heat flux at 10 nm separation than sandwich and monocell structures do, respectively, due to the continuously and perfectly coupled modes. The heat flux is found to be 4 orders of magnitude larger than that of the blackbody. The effective tunability of the thermal radiation of the multicell structure is also observed by adjusting the chemical potentials of graphene with an optimized thickness of 20 nm on each hBN, which is instructive for both experimental design and fabrication of thermal radiation devices.

Coupling modes between surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs) play a vital role in enhancing near-field thermal radiation but are relatively unexplored, and no experimental result is available. Here, we consider the NFTR enhancement between two identical graphene-covered SiO2 heterostructures with millimeter-scale surface area and report an experimentally record-breaking ∼64-fold enhancement compared to blackbody (BB) limit at a gap distance of 170 nm. The energy transmission coefficient and radiation spectra show that the physical mechanism behind the colossal enhancement is the coupling between the surface plasmon and phonon polaritons.

Plasmon–emitter hybrid nanocavity systems exhibit strong plasmon–exciton interactions at the single-emitter level, showing great potential as testbeds and building blocks for quantum optics and informatics. However, reported experiments involve only one addressable emitting site, which limits their relevance for many fundamental questions and devices involving interactions among emitters. Here we open up this critical degree of freedom by demonstrating selective far-field excitation and detection of two coupled quantum dot emitters in a U-shaped gold nanostructure. The gold nanostructure functions as a nanocavity to enhance emitter interactions and a nanoantenna to make the emitters selectively excitable and detectable. When we selectively excite or detect either emitter, we observe photon emission predominantly from the target emitter with up to 132-fold Purcell-enhanced emission rate, indicating individual addressability and strong plasmon–exciton interactions. Our work represents a step towards a broad class of plasmonic devices that will enable faster, more compact optics, communication and computation.

The effect of nonlocal optical response is studied for a novel silicon hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW). Finite element method is used to implement the hydrodynamic model and the propagation mode is analyzed for a hybrid plasmonic waveguide of arbitrary cross section. The waveguide has an inverted metal nano-rib over a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structure. An extremely small mode area of~10⁻⁶λ² is achieved together with several microns long propagation distance at the telecom wavelength of 1.55 μm. The figure of merit (FoM) is also improved in the same time, compared to the pervious hybrid plasmonic waveguide. We demonstrate the validity of our method by comparing our simulating results with some analytical results for a metal cylindrical waveguide and a metal slab waveguide in a wide wavelength range. For the HPW, we find that the nonlocal effects can give less loss and better confinement. In particular, we explore the influence of the radius of the rib's tip on the loss and the confinement. We show that the nonlocal effects give some new fundamental limitation on the confinement, leaving the mode area finite even for geometries with infinitely sharp tips.

Abstract-Here we realize a broadband absorber by using a hyperbolic metamaterial composed of alternating aluminum-alumina thin films based on superposition of multiple slow-wave modes. Our super absorber ensures broadband and polarization-insensitive light absorption over almost the entire solar spectrum, near-infrared and short-wavelength infrared regime (500-2500 nm) with a simulated absorption of over 90%. The designed structure is fabricated and the measured results are given. This absorber yields an average measured absorption of 85% in the spectrum ranging from 500 nm to 2300 nm. The proposed absorbers open an avenue towards realizing thermal emission and energyharvesting materials.