Negative refraction of ultra-squeezed in-plane hyperbolic designer polaritons

Abstract

The in-plane negative refraction of high-momentum (i.e., high- k ) photonic modes could enable many applications such as imaging, focusing, and waveguiding in a planar platform at deep-subwavelength scales. However, its practical implementation in experiments remains elusive so far. Here we propose a class of hyperbolic metasurfaces, which is characterized by an anisotropic magnetic sheet conductivity and can support the in-plane ultra-high- k magnetic designer polaritons. Based on such metasurfaces, we report the experimental observation of the all-angle negative refraction of designer polaritons at extremely deep-subwavelength scales. Moreover, we directly visualize the designer polaritons with hyperbolic dispersions. Importantly, for these hyperbolic polaritons, we find that their squeezing factor is ultra-large. To be specific, it can be up to 129 in the experiments, an ultra-high value exceeding those in naturally hyperbolic materials. This work may pave a way toward exploring the extremely high confinement and unusual propagation of magnetic designer polaritons over monolayer or twisted bilayer hyperbolic metasurfaces.