Probing Nonlocal Effects in Metals with Graphene Plasmons
Abstract
In this paper we analyze the effects of nonlocality on the optical properties of a system consisting of a thin metallic film separated from a graphene sheet by a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) layer. We show that nonlocal effects in the metal have a strong impact on the spectrum of the surface plasmon-polaritons on graphene. If the graphene sheet is shaped into a grating, we show that the extinction curves can be used to shed light on the importance of nonlocal effects in metals. Therefore, graphene surface plasmons emerge as a tool for probing nonlocal effects in metallic nanostructures, including thin metallic films. As a byproduct of our study, we show that nonlocal effects lead to smaller losses for the graphene plasmons than what is predicted by a local calculation. We show that these effects can be very well mimicked using a local theory with an effective spacer thickness larger than its actual value.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1804.06478,
title = {Probing Nonlocal Effects in Metals with Graphene Plasmons},
author = {Eduardo J. C. Dias and David Alcaraz Iranzo and P. A. D. Gonçalves and Yaser Hajati and Yuliy V. Bludov and Antti-Pekka Jauho and N. Asger Mortensen and Frank H. L. Koppens and N. M. R. Peres},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.06478},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
16 pages