Plasmon modes of a massive Dirac plasma, and their superlattices

We explore the collective density oscillations of a collection of charged massive Dirac particles, in one, two, and three dimensions, and their one-dimensional (1D) superlattice. We calculate the long-wavelength limit of the dynamical polarization function analytically, and use the random phase approximation to obtain the plasmon dispersion. The density dependence of the long-wavelength plasmon frequency in massive Dirac systems is found to be different compared to systems with parabolic and gapless Dirac dispersion. We also calculate the long-wavelength plasmon dispersion of a 1D metamaterial made from 1D and 2D massive Dirac plasma. Our analytical results will be useful for exploring the use of massive Dirac materials as electrostatically tunable plasmonic metamaterials and can be experimentally verified by infrared spectroscopy, as in the case of graphene [L. Ju et al., Nat. Nanotechnol. 6, 630 (2011) (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.146)].