Gate-tuning of graphene plasmons revealed by infrared nano-imaging

By Z. Fei, A. Rodin, G. Andreev, Wenzhong Bao, A. Mcleod, M. Wagner, L. M. Zhang, Zeng Zhao, M. Thiemens, G. Domínguez and 5 more. Nature, 2012

1,933 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Surface plasmons are collective oscillations of electrons in metals or semiconductors that enable confinement and control of electromagnetic energy at subwavelength scales. Rapid progress in plasmonics has largely relied on advances in device nano-fabrication, whereas less attention has been paid to the tunable properties of plasmonic media. One such medium—graphene—is amenable to convenient tuning of its electronic and optical properties by varying the applied voltage. Here, using infrared nano-imaging, we show that common graphene/SiO2/Si back-gated structures support propagating surface plasmons. The wavelength of graphene plasmons is of the order of 200 nanometres at technologically relevant infrared frequencies, and they can propagate several times this distance. We have succeeded in altering both the amplitude and the wavelength of these plasmons by varying the gate voltage. Using plasmon interferometry, we investigated losses in graphene by exploring real-space profiles of plasmon standing waves formed between the tip of our nano-probe and the edges of the samples. Plasmon dissipation quantified through this analysis is linked to the exotic electrodynamics of graphene. Standard plasmonic figures of merit of our tunable graphene devices surpass those of common metal-based structures.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c40c7ad74d834031d311ac452fa795a769d47e5

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Citations in the corpus

Review of mid-infrared plasmonic materials (2015, background): “For this reason, many of the clearest studies of propagating plasmons on graphene have utilized unique near-field scanning optical microscopes operating at mid-IR frequencies, which allow near-field coupling of free-space radiation to graphene plasmons via a nanoscale scattering tip.(112,113) Altern”
Excitation of plasmonic waves in graphene by guided-mode resonances. (2012, neutral): “While the additional loss observed in experiments severely limits the ER of the proposed device (and the performance of graphene plasmonic devices in general),(23) it is not conclusive yet howmuch of this additional loss is from an intrinsic process such as the electron electron interaction, and how”
Graphene Photonics, Plasmonics, and Optoelectronics (2014, background): “Experimentally, confinement factors of 40–60 have been reported [45], [46].”
Raman characterization of defects and dopants in graphene (2015, background): “Plasmons in doped graphene have also been directly imaged at the nanoscale [127, 128].”
Low-loss, infrared and terahertz nanophotonics using surface phonon polaritons (2015, methodology): “This mismatch can be overcome using the coupling of the incident field to surface modes through a diffraction grating [92], high index prism [58, 93, 94], scattering from a nearby sub-wavelength particle such as an SNOM tip [20, 36, 38, 64] or via nanostructuring of the SPhP material into sub-wavele”