UC Berkeley

Plasmons depend strongly on dimensionality: while plasmons in three-dimensional systems start with finite energy at wavevector q = 0, plasmons in traditional two-dimensional (2D) electron gas disperse as [Formula: see text]. However, besides graphene, plasmons in real, atomically thin quasi-2D materials were heretofore not well understood. Here we show that the plasmons in real quasi-2D metals are qualitatively different, being virtually dispersionless for wavevectors of typical experimental interest. This stems from a broken continuous translational symmetry which leads to interband screening; so, dispersionless plasmons are a universal intrinsic phenomenon in quasi-2D metals. Moreover, our ab initio calculations reveal that plasmons of monolayer metallic transition metal dichalcogenides are tunable, long lived, able to sustain field intensity enhancement exceeding 10⁷, and localizable in real space (within ~20 nm) with little spreading over practical measurement time. This opens the possibility of tracking plasmon wave packets in real time for novel imaging techniques in atomically thin materials.