Visualization of nano-plasmons in graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates nano-plasmons in graphene near impurities, revealing how impurity characteristics influence plasmonic modes and demonstrating the need for advanced visualization techniques to analyze complex spatial patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a combined visual and quantitative approach for analyzing nano-plasmonic excitations in graphene, highlighting impurity-induced localized modes and their symmetries.

Findings

Impurities induce localized plasmonic modes with various symmetries.

Visualization reveals dipolar, quadrupolar, and radial plasmonic modes.

Analysis shows dispersion depends on impurity parameters.

Abstract

We study localized plasmons at the nanoscale (nano-plasmons) in graphene. The collective excitations of induced charge density modulations in graphene are drastically changed in the vicinity of a single impurity compared to graphene's bulk behavior. The dispersion of nano-plasmons depends on the number of electrons and the sign, strength and size of the impurity potential. Due to this rich parameter space the calculated dispersions are intrinsically multidimensional requiring an advanced visualization tool for their efficient analysis, which can be achieved with parallel rendering. To overcome the problem of analyzing thousands of very complex spatial patterns of nano-plasmonic modes, we take a combined visual and quantitative approach to investigate the excitations on the two-dimensional graphene lattice. Our visual and quantitative analysis shows that impurities trigger the formation of localized plasmonic excitations of various symmetries. We visually identify dipolar, quadrupolar and radial modes, and quantify the spatial distributions of induced charges.