Coupling light into graphene plasmons through surface acoustic waves

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to efficiently couple laser light into graphene plasmons using electrically generated surface acoustic waves, creating a diffraction grating without patterning the graphene.

Contribution

It presents a novel electrically controlled coupling scheme that avoids graphene patterning and complex optical techniques.

Findings

Enables coupling of infrared laser light into graphene plasmons.

Uses surface acoustic waves to form a diffraction grating.

Allows electrical switching of plasmon excitation.

Abstract

We propose a scheme for coupling laser light into graphene plasmons with the help of electrically generated surface acoustic waves. The surface acoustic wave forms a diffraction grating which allows to excite the long lived phonon-like branch of the hybridized graphene plasmon-phonon dispersion with infrared laser light. Our approach avoids patterning the graphene sheet, does not rely on complicated optical near-field techniques, and allows to electrically switch the coupling between far field radiation and propagating graphene plasmons.