Electrically Tunable Damping of Plasmonic Resonances with Graphene

• DOI: 10.1021/nl302322t
• Publication Date: 2012-09-05T15:22:08Z
• Authors: Naresh K. Emani; Ting-Fung Chung; Xingjie Ni; Alexander V. Kild...; Yong P. Chen; Alexandra Boltasseva
• Keywords: Graphene; plasmonics; tunable resonances; interband losses; METAMATERIALS; OPTICS; interband losses; 02 engineering and technology; 530; 7. Clean energy; plasmonics; 620; Nanoscience and Nanotechnology; METAMATERIALS; tunable resonances; Graphene; OPTICS; 0210 nano-technology

Dynamic switching of a plasmonic resonance may find numerous applications in subwavelength optoelectronics, spectroscopy, and sensing. Graphene shows a highly tunable carrier concentration under electrostatic gating, and this could provide an effective route to achieving electrical control of the plasmonic resonance. In this Letter, we demonstrate electrical control of a plasmonic resonance at infrared frequencies using large-area graphene. Plasmonic structures fabricated on graphene enhance the interaction of the incident optical field with the graphene sheet, and the impact of graphene is much stronger at mid-infrared wavelengths. Full-wave simulations, where graphene is modeled as a 1 nm thick effective medium, show excellent agreement with experimental results.