Study points the way to new photonic devices with one-way traffic lanes

Researchers at MIT and other institutions have found a new phenomenon in the behavior of a kind of quasiparticles called plasmons as they move along tiny ribbons of two-dimensional materials such as graphene and TMDs (transition metal dichalcogenides), which have a hexagonal structure resembling chicken wire. The team found that these plasmons can be separated into two different streams moving in opposite directions at the edges of the ribbons, like traffic on a two-lane highway, without the nee