Moiré-driven reconstitution on electromagnetic energy transfer

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed an explosion in the field of twistronics concepts, opening the door to numerous extraordinary physical phenomena such as weak ferroelectric charge transfer, superconductivity, topologically protected states, and so on. Here, inspired by the twistronics concepts, we take a moiré three-body system consisting of three metasurfaces supporting highly confined hyperbolic surface plasmons as an example, introducing an analogous concept into the study of near-field electromagnetic energy transfer within three-body system. We demonstrate the possible existence of the moiré transistor effect induced by the twisted hyperbolic repeater in the polariton coupling system (source and drain parallel to each other), where the near-field electromagnetic energy transfer exchanged between the source and the drain can be reversibly switched, amplified, and modulated by action on moiré patterns. Moreover, we point out that for the symmetry-breaking situations (source and drain not parallel to each other), there is also a magic angle in this system and demonstrate that the twisted hyperbolic repeater can act as a moiré compensation effect at this magic angle, mitigating to a certain extent the electromagnetic energy attenuation caused by the malposition between source and drain. Our findings may open new opportunities for the development of near-field thermal energy transport, enabling new perspectives concerning thermal management at the nanoscale, near-field energy conversion, and infrared spectroscopy.