High quality nanocavities through multimodal confinement of hyperbolic polaritons in hexagonal boron nitride

Abstract

A conventional optical cavity supports modes which are confined because they are unable to leak out of the cavity. Bound state in continuum (BIC) cavities are an unconventional alternative, where light can leak out, but is confined by multimodal destructive interference. BICs are a general wave phenomenon, of particular interest to optics, but BICs and multimodal interference have never been demonstrated at the nanoscale. Here, we demonstrate the first nanophotonic cavities based on BIC-like multimodal interference. This novel confinement mechanism for deep sub-wavelength light shows orders of magnitude improvement in several confinement metrics. Specifically, we obtain cavity volumes below 100x100x3nm^3 with quality factors about 100, with extreme cases having 23x23x3nm^3 volumes or quality factors above 400. Key to our approach, is the use of pristine crystalline hyperbolic dispersion media (HyM) which can support large momentum excitations with relatively low losses. Making a HyM cavity is complicated by the additional modes that appear in a HyM. Ordinarily, these serve as additional channels for leakage, reducing cavity performance. But, in our experiments, we find a BIC-like cavity confinement enhancement effect, which is intimately related to the ray-like nature of HyM excitations. In fact, the quality factors of our cavities exceed the maximum that is possible in the absence of higher order modes. The alliance of HyM with BICs in our work yields a radically novel way to confine light and is expected to have far reaching consequences wherever strong optical confinement is utilized, from ultra-strong light-matter interactions, to mid-IR nonlinear optics and a range of sensing applications.