Electrical Control of Plasmon Resonance with Graphene

Surface plasmon, with its unique capability to concentrate light into sub-wavelength volume, has enabled great advances in photon science, ranging from nano-antenna and single-molecule Raman scattering to plasmonic waveguide and metamaterials. In many applications it is desirable to control the surface plasmon resonance in situ with electric field. Graphene, with its unique tunable optical properties, provides an ideal material to integrate with nanometallic structures for realizing such control. Here we demonstrate effective modulation of the plasmon resonance in a model system composed of hybrid graphene-gold nanorod structure. Upon electrical gating the strong optical transitions in graphene can be switched on and off, which leads to significant modulation of both the resonance frequency and quality factor of plasmon resonance in gold nanorods. Hybrid graphene-nanometallic structures, as exemplified by this combination of graphene and gold nanorod, provide a general and powerful way for electrical control of plasmon resonances. It holds promise for novel active optical devices and plasmonic circuits at the deep subwavelength scale

Strong exciton-plasmon coupling in semiconducting carbon nanotubes

We study theoretically the interactions of excitonic states with surface electromagnetic modes of small-diameter (~1 nm) semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes. We show that these interactions can result in strong exciton-surface-plasmon coupling. The exciton absorption line shape exhibits Rabi splitting ~0.1 eV as the exciton energy is tuned to the nearest interband surface plasmon resonance of the nanotube. We also show that the quantum confined Stark effect may be used as a tool to control the exciton binding energy and the nanotube band gap in carbon nanotubes in order, e.g., to bring the exciton total energy in resonance with the nearest interband plasmon mode. The exciton-plasmon Rabi splitting we predict here for an individual carbon nanotube is close in its magnitude to that previously reported for hybrid plasmonic nanostructures artificially fabricated of organic semiconductors on metallic films. We expect this effect to open up paths to new tunable optoelectronic device applications of semiconducting carbon nanotubes.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, accepted for PR

A tunable plasmonic refractive index sensor with nanoring-strip graphene arrays

In this paper, a tunable plasmonic refractive index sensor with nanoring-strip graphene arrays is numerically investigated by the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The simulation results exhibit that by changing the sensing medium refractive index nmed of the structure, the sensing range of the system is large. By changing the doping level ng, we noticed that the transmission characteristics can be adjusted flexibly. The resonance wavelength remains entirely the same and the transmission dip enhancement over a big range of incidence angles [0,45] for both TM and TE polarizations, which indicates that the resonance of the graphene nanoring-strip arrays is insensitive to angle polarization. The above results are undoubtedly a new way to realize various tunable plasmon devices, and may have a great application prospect in biosensing, detection and imaging

Plasmon Resonance in Multilayer Graphene Nanoribbons

Plasmon resonance in nanopatterned single layer graphene nanoribbon (SL-GNR), double layer graphene nanoribbon (DL-GNR) and triple layer graphene nanoribbon (TL-GNR) structures is studied both experimentally and by numerical simulations. We use 'realistic' graphene samples in our experiments to identify the key bottle necks in both experiments and theoretical models. The existence of electrical tunable plasmons in such stacked multilayer GNRs was first experimentally verified by infrared microscopy. We find that the strength of the plasmonic resonance increases in DL-GNR when compared to SL-GNRs. However, we do not find a further such increase in TL-GNRs compared to DL-GNRs. We carried out systematic full wave simulations using finite element technique to validate and fit experimental results, and extract the carrier scattering rate as a fitting parameter. The numerical simulations show remarkable agreement with experiments for unpatterned SLG sheet, and a qualitative agreement for patterned graphene sheet. We believe that further improvements such as introducing a bandgap into the numerical model could lead to a better quantitative agreement of numerical simulations with experiments. We also note that such advanced modeling would first require better quality graphene samples and accurate measurements

Tunable grating-assisted surface plasmon resonance by use of nano-polymer dispersed liquid crystal electro-optical material

This paper reports on the experimental observation of the displacement of a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) excited by a metallic diffraction grating. This effect is achieved by the use of an electro-optical material composed of nano-sized droplets of liquid crystals dispersed in a host polymer. The average refractive index of this material in the form of a thin film on the undulated metal surface can be modified with the application of an external electric field and to tune the wavelength at which the SPR excitation leads to a reflection minimum. The theoretical design and experimental demonstration of the principle of this component are described