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Abstract Plasmon polaritons, or plasmons, are coupled oscillations of electrons and electromagnetic fields that can confine the latter into deeply subwavelength scales, enabling novel polaritonic devices. While plasmons have been extensively studied in normal metals or semimetals, they remain largely unexplored in correlated materials. In this paper, we report infrared (IR) nano-imaging of thin flakes of CsV₃Sb₅, a prototypical layered Kagome metal. We observe propagating plasmon waves in real-space with wavelengths tunable by the flake thickness. From their frequency-momentum dispersion, we infer the out-of-plane dielectric function$${{{{{{\boldsymbol{\epsilon }}}}}}}_{{{{{{\boldsymbol{c}}}}}}}$$ ${ϵ}_c$that is generally difficult to obtain in conventional far-field optics, and elucidate signatures of electronic correlations when compared to density functional theory (DFT). We propose correlation effects might have switched the real part of$${{{{{{\boldsymbol{\epsilon }}}}}}}_{{{{{{\boldsymbol{c}}}}}}}$$ ${ϵ}_c$from negative to positive values over a wide range of middle-IR frequencies, transforming the surface plasmons into hyperbolic bulk plasmons, and have dramatically suppressed their dissipation. 

Abstract Coulomb repulsion among conduction electrons in solids hinders their motion and leads to a rise in resistivity. A regime of electronic phase separation is expected at the first-order phase transition between a correlated metal and a paramagnetic Mott insulator, but remains unexplored experimentally as well as theoretically nearby T  = 0. We approach this issue by assessing the complex permittivity via dielectric spectroscopy, which provides vivid mapping of the Mott transition and deep insight into its microscopic nature. Our experiments utilizing both physical pressure and chemical substitution consistently reveal a strong enhancement of the quasi-static dielectric constant ε 1 when correlations are tuned through the critical value. All experimental trends are captured by dynamical mean-field theory of the single-band Hubbard model supplemented by percolation theory. Our findings suggest a similar ’dielectric catastrophe’ in many other correlated materials and explain previous observations that were assigned to multiferroicity or ferroelectricity.