It is by now well established that high-quality graphene enables a gate-tunable low-loss plasmonic platform for the efficient confinement, enhancement, and manipulation of optical fields spanning a broad range of frequencies, from the mid infrared to the Terahertz domain. While all-electrical detection of graphene plasmons has been demonstrated, electrical plasmon injection (EPI), which is crucial to operate nanoplasmonic devices without the encumbrance of a far-field optical apparatus, remains elusive. In this work, we present a theory of EPI in double-layer graphene, where a vertical tunnel current excites acoustic and optical plasmon modes. We first calculate the power delivered by the applied inter-layer voltage bias into these collective modes. We then show that this system works also as a spectrally-resolved molecular sensor.
@article{arxiv.1811.00460,
title = {Electrical plasmon injection in double-layer graphene heterostructures},
author = {Karina A. Guerrero-Becerra and Andrea Tomadin and Marco Polini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00460},
year = {2019}
}