Modeling the Excitation of Graphene Plasmons in Periodic Grids of Graphene Ribbons: An Analytical Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytical method to model and predict the excitation of graphene surface plasmons in periodic graphene ribbon structures, enabling efficient design of nanophotonic devices without extensive simulations.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel analytical approach to describe graphene plasmon excitation in periodic ribbons, avoiding complex numerical simulations and matching experimental spectra.

Findings

Analytical expressions for reflectance, transmittance, and absorbance spectra.

Good agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data.

Method enables rapid evaluation on personal computers.

Abstract

We study electromagnetic scattering and subsequent plasmonic excitations in periodic grids of graphene ribbons. To address this problem, we develop an analytical method to describe the plasmon-assisted absorption of electromagnetic radiation by a periodic structure of graphene ribbons forming a diffraction grating for THz and mid-IR light. The major advantage of this method lies in its ability to accurately describe the excitation of graphene surface plasmons (GSPs) in one-dimensional (1D) graphene gratings without the use of both time-consuming, and computationally-demanding full-wave numerical simulations. We thus provide analytical expressions for the reflectance, transmittance and plasmon-enhanced absorbance spectra, which can be readily evaluated in any personal laptop with little-to-none programming. We also introduce a semi-analytical method to benchmark our previous results and further compare the theoretical data with spectra taken from experiments, to which we observe a very good agreement. These theoretical tools may therefore be applied to design new experiments and cutting-edge nanophotonic devices based on graphene plasmonics.