Abstract
Dirac plasmons in graphene are very sensitive to the dielectric
properties of the environment. We show that this can be used to probe
the structure and composition of van der Waals heterostructures (vdWh)
put underneath a single graphene layer. In order to do so, we assess
vdWh composed of hexagonal boron nitride and different types of
transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). By performing realistic
simulations that account for the contribution of each layer of the vdWh
separately and including the importance of the substrate phonons, we
show that one can achieve single-layer resolution by investigating the
nonlocal nature of the Dirac plasmon-polaritons. The composition of the
vdWh stack can be inferred from the plasmon-phonon coupling once it is
composed by more than two TMD layers. Furthermore, we show that the bulk
character of TMD stacks for plasmonic screening properties in the
terahertz regime is reached only beyond 100 layers.
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