Plasmons are quantized collective oscillations of electrons and have been observed in metals and doped semiconductors. The plasmons of ordinary, massive electrons have been the basic ingredients of research in plasmonics and in optical metamaterials for a long time. However, plasmons of massless Dirac electrons have only recently been observed in graphene, a purely two-dimensional electron system. Their properties are promising for novel tunable plasmonic metamaterials in the terahertz and mid-infrared frequency range. Dirac fermions also occur in the two-dimensional electron gas that forms at the surface of topological insulators as a result of the strong spin-orbit interaction existing in the insulating bulk phase. One may therefore look for their collective excitations using infrared spectroscopy. Here we report the first experimental evidence of plasmonic excitations in a topological insulator (Bi2Se3). The material was prepared in thin micro-ribbon arrays of different widths W and periods 2W to select suitable values of the plasmon wavevector k. The linewidth of the plasmon was found to remain nearly constant at temperatures between 6 K and 300 K, as expected when exciting topological carriers. Moreover, by changing W and measuring the plasmon frequency in the terahertz range versus k we show, without using any fitting parameter, that the dispersion curve agrees quantitatively with that predicted for Dirac plasmons.

In La2-xSrxCuO4 (LSCO) the spectral weight W=integralOmega0sigma(ab)1(omega,T)domega [where sigma(ab)1(omega,T) is the ab-plane conductivity] obeys the same law W=W0-BOmegaT2 as in a conventional metal such as gold, for any Omega up to the plasma edge. However, in LSCO BOmega points toward correlation effects and, unlike in gold, is related to an energy scale tT<

The optical conductivity σ1(ω) and the spectral weight SW of four topological insulators with increasing chemical compensation (Bi2Se3,Bi2Se2Te,Bi 2-xCaxSe3, and Bi2Te2Se) have been measured from 5 to 300 K and from subterahertz to visible frequencies. The effect of compensation is clearly observed in the infrared spectra through the suppression of an extrinsic Drude term and the appearance of strong absorption peaks that we assign to electronic transitions among localized states. From the far-infrared spectral weight SW of the most compensated sample (Bi2Te2Se), one can estimate a density of charge carriers on the order of 1017/cm3 in good agreement with transport data. Those results demonstrate that the low-energy electrodynamics in single crystals of topological insulators, even at the highest degree of compensation presently achieved, is still influenced by three-dimensional charge excitations. © 2012 American Physical Society

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