Excitation of Plasmonic Waves in Graphene by Guided-Mode Resonances

• Published in: ACS nano Vol. 6; no. 9; pp. 7806 - 7813
• Main Authors: Gao, Weilu, Shu, Jie, Qiu, Ciyuan, Xu, Qianfan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 25.09.2012
• Subjects: Computer-Aided Design; Devices; Diffraction gratings; Equipment Design; Equipment Failure Analysis; Excitation; Fermi surfaces; Graphene; Graphite - chemistry; Gratings (spectra); Light; Nanostructure; Nanostructures - chemistry; Nanostructures - ultrastructure; Nanotechnology - instrumentation; Particle Size; Plasmonics; Refractometry - instrumentation; Scattering, Radiation; Surface Plasmon Resonance - instrumentation; Wavelengths; nanophotonics; tunable filters; graphene plasmonics; mid-infrared devices; optoelectronics; active plasmonics
• ISSN: 1936-0851; 1936-086X; 1936-086X
• DOI: 10.1021/nn301888e

We propose an active plasmonic device based on graphene. Highly confined plasmonic waves in monolayer graphene are efficiently excited using an etched diffractive grating on silicon. The guided-wave resonance of the combined structure creates a sharp notch on the normal-incidence transmission spectra, as the incident optical wave couples to the graphene plasmonic wave. This structure can be used as a highly tunable optical filter or a broad-band modulator because the resonant wavelength can be quickly tuned over a wide wavelength range by a small change in the Fermi energy level of the graphene. In this paper, we analyze the performance of this device with finite-difference time-domain simulations. We compare the proposed structure with recently demonstrated graphene nanoribbons based on bound plasmonic oscillations.