Graphene plasmonics: Physics and potential applications

TL;DR

This review discusses the unique properties of graphene plasmons, including their tunability, energy confinement, and environmental sensitivity, highlighting recent advances and potential applications in nanophotonics and plasmonics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in graphene plasmonics, focusing on terahertz and mid-infrared plasmons, interactions, and applications.

Findings

Graphene plasmons are highly tunable and exhibit strong energy confinement.

They strongly couple with substrate phonons and molecular vibrations.

Graphene plasmonics enables reconfigurable metamaterials and metasurfaces.

Abstract

Plasmon in graphene possesses many unique properties. It originates from the collective motion of massless Dirac fermions and the carrier density dependence is distinctively different from conventional plasmons. In addition, graphene plasmon is highly tunable and shows strong energy confinement capability. Most intriguing, as an atom-thin layer, graphene and its plasmon are very sensitive to the immediate environment. Graphene plasmons strongly couple to polar phonons of the substrate, molecular vibrations of the adsorbates, and lattice vibrations of other atomically thin layers. In this review paper, we'll present the most important advances in grapene plasmonics field. The topics include terahertz plasmons, mid-infrared plasmons, plasmon-phonon interactions and potential applications. Graphene plasmonics opens an avenue for reconfigurable metamaterials and metasurfaces. It's an exciting and promising new subject in the nanophotonics and plasmonics research field.