Optimized nonlinear terahertz response of graphene in a parallel-plate waveguide

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nonlinear terahertz response of graphene in a specially designed waveguide, demonstrating enhanced third harmonic generation efficiency through phase matching techniques involving layered dielectric materials.

Contribution

It introduces a waveguide design with layered dielectrics to improve phase matching and power efficiency in graphene-based terahertz third harmonic generation.

Findings

Power efficiency exceeds 75% at 2 THz for low Fermi energy graphene.

Efficiency increases by over two times with optimized waveguide design.

Effective third harmonic generation achieved despite system losses.

Abstract

Third harmonic generation of terahertz radiation is expected to occur in monolayer graphene due to the nonlinear relationship between the crystal momentum and the current density. In this work, we calculate the terahertz nonlinear response of graphene inside a parallel-plate waveguide including pump depletion, self-phase, and cross-phase modulation. To overcome the phase mismatching between the pump field and third-harmonic field at high input fields due to self-phase and cross-phase modulation, we design a waveguide with two dielectric layers with different indices of refraction. We find that, by tuning the relative thicknesses of the two layers, we are able to improve phase matching, and thereby increase the power efficiency of the system by more than a factor of two at high powers. With this approach, we find that dispite the loss in this system, for an incident frequency of $2$ THz, we are able to achieve power efficiencies of $75 \%$ for graphene with low Fermi energies of $20$ meV and up to $35\%$ when the Fermi energy is $100$ meV.