English

Highly tunable hybrid metamaterials employing split-ring resonators strongly coupled to graphene surface plasmons

Materials Science 2016-01-07 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

Metamaterials and plasmonics are powerful tools for unconventional manipulation and harnessing of light. Metamaterials can be engineered to possess intriguing properties lacking in natural materials, such as negative refractive index. Plasmonics offers capabilities to confine light in subwavelength dimensions and to enhance light-matter interactions. Recently,graphene-based plasmonics has revealed emerging technological potential as it features large tunability, higher field-confinement and lower loss compared to metal-based plasmonics. Here,we introduce hybrid structures comprising graphene plasmonic resonators efficiently coupled to conventional split-ring resonators, thus demonstrating a type of highly tunable metamaterial, where the interaction between the two resonances reaches the strong-coupling regime. Such hybrid metamaterials are employed as high-speed THz modulators, exhibiting over 60% transmission modulation and operating speed in excess of 40 MHz. This device concept also provides a platform for exploring cavity-enhanced light-matter interactions and optical processes in graphene plasmonic structures for applications including sensing, photo-detection and nonlinear frequency generation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.05490,
  title  = {Highly tunable hybrid metamaterials employing split-ring resonators strongly coupled to graphene surface plasmons},
  author = {Peter Q. Liu and Isaac J. Luxmoore and Sergey A. Mikhailov and Nadja A. Savostianova and Federico Valmorra and Jerome Faist and Geoffrey R. Nash},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.05490},
  year   = {2016}
}