Tunable light trapping and absorption enhancement with graphene-based complementary metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how graphene-based complementary metamaterials can be used to achieve tunable light trapping and absorption enhancement, with polarization sensitivity, for advanced photodetectors in mid-infrared and THz regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design utilizing graphene-based metamaterials for dynamic, polarization-sensitive light absorption enhancement.

Findings

Tunable light trapping achieved via Fermi energy manipulation.

Polarization-sensitive absorption for TM and TE waves.

Potential applications in tunable photodetectors.

Abstract

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) has been intensively investigated and widely exploited to trap the incident light and enhance absorption in the optoelectronic devices. The availability of graphene as a plasmonic material with strong half-metallicity and continuously tunable surface conductivity makes it promising to dynamically modulate the absorption enhancement with graphene-based metamaterials. Here we numerically demonstrate tunable light trapping and absorption enhancement can be realized with graphene-based complementary metamaterials. Furthermore, we also explore the polarization sensitivity in the proposed device, in which case either TM or TE plane wave at the specific wavelength can be efficiently absorbed by simply manipulating the Fermi energy of graphene. Therefore, this work can find potential applications in the next generation of photodetectors with tunable spectral and polarization selectivity in the mid-infrared and terahertz (THz) regimes.