Retrieving optical parameters of emerging van der Waals flakes

High-quality low-dimensional layered and van der Waals materials are typically exfoliated, with sample cross sectional areas on the order of tens to hundreds of microns. The small size of flakes makes the experimental characterization of their dielectric properties unsuitable with conventional spectroscopic ellipsometry, due to beam-sample size mismatch and non-uniformities of the crystal axes. Previously, the experimental measurement of the dielectrirc permittivity of such microcrystals was carried out with near-field tip-based scanning probes. These measurements are sensitive to external conditions like vibrations and temperature, and require non-deterministic numerical fitting to some a priori known model. We present an alternative method to extract the in-plane dielectric permittivity of van der Waals microcrystals, based on identifying reflectance minima in spectroscopic measurements. Our method does not require complex fitting algorithms nor near field tip-based measurements and accommodates for small-area samples. We demonstrate the robustness of our method using hexagonal boron nitride and {\alpha}-MoO3, and recover their dielectric permittivities that are close to literature values.
Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure and 3 tables