Electrodynamics of spoof plasmons in periodically corrugated waveguides.

States of the electromagnetic field confined near a periodically corrugated surface of a perfect conductor, spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPP), are approached systematically based on the developed adaptation of the mode matching technique to the transfer matrix formalism. Within this approach, in the approximation of narrow grooves, systems with arbitrary transversal structure can be investigated straightforwardly, thus lifting the restrictions of the effective medium description and usual implementations of mode matching. A compact expression for the SSPP coupling parameter accounting for the effect of higher Bloch modes is found. The results of the general analysis are applied for studying the effect of dielectric environment on SSPP spectra. It is shown that the effective SSPP plasma frequency is unaffected by the dielectric constant of the medium outside of the grooves and the main effect of sufficiently wide dielectric slabs covering the corrugated surface is described by simple rescaling of the maximal value of the Bloch wavenumber and the coupling parameter. Additionally, in the case of a thin dielectric layer, it is shown that SSPP are sensitive to variation of the thickness of the layer on the sub-wavelength scale.

Dirac electrons in the presence of a matrix potential barrier: application to graphene and topological insulators.

Scattering of 2D Dirac electrons on a rectangular matrix potential barrier is considered using the formalism of spinor transfer matrices. It is shown, in particular, that in the absence of the mass term, the Klein tunneling is not necessarily suppressed but occurs at oblique incidence. The formalism is applied to studying waveguiding modes of the barrier, which are supported by the edge and bulk states. The condition of the existence of the uni-directionality property is found. We show that the band of edge states is always finite with massless excitations, while the spectrum of the bulk states, depending on the parameters of the barrier, may consist of the infinite or finite band with both, massive and massless, low-energy excitations. The effect of the Zeeman term is considered and the condition of the appearance of two distinct energy-dependent directions corresponding to the Klein tunneling is found.

Tuning the electrical property via defect engineering of single layer MoS2 by oxygen plasma.

We have demonstrated that the electrical property of single-layer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) can be significantly tuned from the semiconducting to the insulating regime via controlled exposure to oxygen plasma. The mobility, on-current and resistance of single-layer MoS2 devices were varied by up to four orders of magnitude by controlling the plasma exposure time. Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and density functional theory studies suggest that the significant variation of electronic properties is caused by the creation of insulating MoO3-rich disordered domains in the MoS2 sheet upon oxygen plasma exposure, leading to an exponential variation of resistance and mobility as a function of plasma exposure time. The resistance variation calculated using an effective medium model is in excellent agreement with the measurements. The simple approach described here can be used for the fabrication of tunable two-dimensional nanodevices based on MoS2 and other transition metal dichalcogenides.