The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in collaboration with Kansas State University, has discovered slab waveguides based on the two-dimensional material hexagonal boron nitride. This milestone has been reported in the journal Advanced Materials.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a class of materials that can be reduced to the monolayer limit by mechanically peeling the layers apart. The weak interlayer attractions (van der Waals attraction) allow the layers to be separated via the so-called "Scotch tape" method.
The most well-known 2D material, graphene, is a semimetallic material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms. Recently, other 2D materials including semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and insulating hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have also garnered attention. When reduced near the monolayer limit, 2D materials have unique nanoscale properties that are appealing for creating atomically thin electronic and optical devices.
"We knew using hexagonal boron nitride would lead to outstanding optical properties in our samples; none of us expected that it would also act a waveguide," said Samuel Lagasse, Ph.D., Novel Materials and Applications Division. "Since hBN is used so widely in 2D material–based devices, this novel usage as an optical waveguide potentially has wide-ranging impacts."
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