Ultrafast Control of Lifetime in High Q Anisotropic Plasmon Polaritons

RESUMO

Losses are a major roadblock in the technological implementation of surface plasmons at optical frequencies. The recent emergence of MoOCl2, a correlated van-der-Waals material with strongly anisotropic optical properties, offers new avenues to circumvent this limit. We report the far-field observation of high-Q surface plasmon polaritons in this material, arising from the anisotropic hybridisation of surface plasmons and dielectric modes. We then explore nonlinear pumping of intraband electrons to the conduction band in these structures, leading, contrary to intuition, to an abrupt increase in the lifetime of the polariton resonance, despite the injection of hot electrons. This counterintuitive phenomenon stems from the competition between photon and plasmon excitations in a lenticular polariton resonance, yielding a largely tuneable lifetime at ultrafast speeds.