Plasmonic Transverse Dipole Moment in Chiral Fermion Nanowires

Abstract

Plasmons are elementary quantum excitations of conducting materials with Fermi surfaces. In two dimensions they may carry a static dipole moment that is transverse to their momentum which is quantum geometric in nature, the quantum geometric dipole (QGD). We show that this property is also realized for such materials confined in nanowire geometries. Focusing on the gapless, intra-subband plasmon excitations, we compute the transverse dipole moment Dx of the modes for a variety of situations. We find that single chiral fermions generically host non-vanishing Dx, even when there is no intrinsic gap in the two-dimensional spectrum, for which the corresponding two-dimensional QGD vanishes. In the limit of very wide wires, the transverse dipole moment of the highest velocity plasmon mode matches onto the two-dimensional QGD. Plasmons of multi-valley systems that are time-reversal symmetric have vanishing transverse dipole moment, but can be made to carry non-vanishing values by breaking the valley symmetry, for example via magnetic field. The presence of a non-vanishing transverse dipole moment for nanowire plasmons in principle offers the possibility of continuously controlling their energies and velocities by the application of a static transverse electric field.