Trapping and guiding surface plasmons in curved graphene landscapes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for trapping and guiding surface plasmons in graphene by utilizing the curvature of the substrate, enabling new ways to manipulate light at the nanoscale.

Contribution

The study derives a governing equation for channel plasmons in curved graphene and validates it with numerical simulations, revealing a new confinement mechanism based on curvature.

Findings

Curved graphene can trap and guide surface plasmons near bumps and wells.

Localized surface modes can be supported by isolated deformations like bumps.

The approach offers a versatile platform for manipulating light in planar landscapes.

Abstract

We demonstrate that graphene placed on top of structured substrates offers a novel approach for trapping and guiding surface plasmons. A monolayer graphene with a spatially varying curvature exhibits an effective trapping potential for graphene plasmons near curved areas such as bumps, humps and wells. We derive the governing equation for describing such localized channel plasmons guided by curved graphene and validate our theory by the first-principle numerical simulations. The proposed confinement mechanism enables plasmon guiding by the regions of maximal curvature, and it offers a versatile platform for manipulating light in planar landscapes. In addition, isolated deformations of graphene such as bumps are shown to support localized surface modes and resonances suggesting a new way to engineer plasmonic metasurfaces.