Probing Graphene's Nonlocality with Singular Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper extends the theoretical understanding of singular graphene metasurfaces by incorporating nonlocal electron response effects, revealing their impact on plasmon resonance spectra and proposing a simplified local model to emulate nonlocality.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive nonlocal response model for graphene metasurfaces and offers a simple local analogue to facilitate practical simulations.

Findings

Nonlocal effects significantly alter plasmon resonance spectra.

A local model with a constant conductivity offset can mimic nonlocal responses.

The extended theory improves the accuracy of graphene plasmonic device modeling.

Abstract

Singular graphene metasurfaces, conductivity gratings realized by periodically suppressing the local doping level of a graphene sheet, have recently been proposed to efficiently harvest THz light and couple it to surface plasmons over broad absorption bands, achieving remarkably high field enhancement. However, the large momentum wavevectors thus attained are sensitive to the nonlocal behaviour of the underlying electron liquid. Here, we extend the theory of singular graphene metasurfaces to account for the full nonlocal optical response of graphene and discuss the resulting impact on the plasmon resonance spectrum. Finally, we propose a simple local analogue model that is able to reproduce the effect of nonlocality in local-response calculations by introducing a constant conductivity offset, which could prove a valuable tool in the modelling of more complex experimental graphene-based platforms.