Experimental confirmation of long hyperbolic polariton lifetimes in monoisotopic ((10)B) hexagonal boron nitride at room temperature

Hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs) enable strong confinements, low losses, and intrinsic beam steering capabilities determined by the refractive index anisotropy—providing opportunities from hyperlensing to flat optics and other applications. Here, two scanning-probe techniques, photothermal induced resonance (PTIR) and scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM), are used to map infrared [Formula: see text] HPhPs in large (up to [Formula: see text] near-monoisotopic [Formula: see text]) hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) flakes. Wide [Formula: see text] PTIR and s-SNOM scans on such large flakes avoid interference from polaritons launched from different asperities (edges, folds, surface defects, etc.) and together with Fourier analyses [Formula: see text] resolution) enable precise measurements of HPhP lifetimes (up to [Formula: see text] and propagation lengths (up to [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] for the first- and second-order branches, respectively). With respect to naturally abundant hBN, we report an eightfold improved, record-high (for hBN) propagating figure of merit (i.e., with both high confinement and long lifetime) in [Formula: see text] hBN, achieving, finally, theoretically predicted values. We show that wide near-field scans critically enable accurate estimates of the polaritons’ lifetimes and propagation lengths and that the incidence angle of light, with respect to both the sample plane and the flake edge, needs to be considered to extract correctly the dispersion relation from the near-field polaritons maps. Overall, the measurements and data analyses employed here elucidate details pertaining to polaritons’ propagation in isotopically enriched hBN and pave the way for developing high-performance HPhP-based devices.