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Bruno Majérus

Publications and source records attributed to Bruno Majérus.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Anisotropy and effective medium approach in the optical response of 2D material heterostructures

2D materials offer a large variety of optical properties, from transparency to plasmonic excitation. They can be structured and combined to form heterostructures that expand the realm of possibility to manipulate light interactions at the nanoscale. Appropriate and numerically efficient models accounting for the high intrinsic anisotropy of 2D materials and heterostructures are needed. In this article, we retrieve the relevant intrinsic parameters that describe the optical response of a homogeneous 2D material from a microscopic approach. Well-known effective models for vertical heterostructure (stacking of different layers) are retrieved. We found that the effective optical response model of horizontal heterostructures (alternating nano-ribbons) depends of the thickness. In the thin layer model, well adapted for 2D materials, a counter-intuitive in-plane isotropic behavior is predicted. We confront the effective model formulation with exact reference calculations such as ab-initio calculations for graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), as well as corrugated graphene with larger thickness but also with classical electrodynamics calculations that exactly account for the lateral structuration.

physics.optics↗

Optical modelling of single and multilayer 2D materials and heterostructures

Bidimensional materials are ideally viewed as having no thickness, as their name suggests. Their optical response have been previously modelled by a purely bidimensional surface current or by a very thin film with some contradictory results. The advent of multilayer stacks of bidimensional materials and combinations of different materials in vertical van der Waals heterostructures highlights however that these materials have a finite thickness. In this article, we propose a new model that reconciles both approaches and we show how volume properties of stacked bidimensional layers can be calculated from the bidimensional response of each individual layer, and conversely. In our approach, each bidimensionnal layers is surrounded by vacuum and described as a kind of transfer matrix with intrinsic parameters that do not depend on the external medium. This provides a link between continuous thin films and discrete layers. We show how to model heterostructures of bidimensional materials and identify the parameters of the current sheet that represents the bidimensional material in the zero-thickness limit, namely the in-plane surface susceptibility and the out-of-plane displacement susceptibility. We show that our unified model is perfectly compatible with existing ellipsometric data with the same reliability as the existing interface model but with different values of the surface susceptibility or bulk dielectric function. We discuss in details the origin of the discrepancies and show that our approach allows to determine intrinsic properties of the bidimensional materials with the advantage that multilayer and monolayer systems are described in a same framework.

physics.optics↗

Electrodynamic models of 2D materials: can we match thin film and single sheet approaches?

The electromagnetic properties of 2D materials are modeled either as single sheets with a surface susceptibility or conductivity, or as thin films of finite thickness with an effective permittivity. Their intrinsic anisotropy, however, has to be fully described to reliably predict the optical response of systems based on 2D materials or to unambiguously interpret experimental data. In the present work, we compare the two approaches within the transfer matrix formalism and provide analytical relations between them. We strongly emphasize the consequences of the anisotropy. In particular, we demonstrate the crucial role of the choice of the thin film's effective thickness compared with the parameters of the single sheet approach and therefore the computed properties of the 2D material under study. Indeed, if the isotropic thin film model with very low thickness is similar to an anisotropic single sheet with no out-of-plane response, with larger thickness it matches with a single sheet with isotropic susceptibility, in the reasonable small phase condition. We illustrate our conclusions on extensively studied experimental quantities such as transmittance, ellipsometry and optical contrast, and we discuss similarities and discrepancies reported in the literature when using single sheet or thin film models.

physics.optics↗