Optical amplification of surface plasmon polaritons in a graphene single layer integrated with a random grating

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a graphene-based terahertz plasmonic waveguide with a random grating that enhances surface plasmon amplification through Anderson localization, with potential applications in sensing and switching.

Contribution

It introduces a novel active plasmonic waveguide design using a random grating to significantly amplify surface plasmon polaritons in graphene at terahertz frequencies.

Findings

Resonant peak enhancement factor up to 175.

Temperature and pump intensity affect resonance frequency and intensity.

Temperature increase reduces amplified output intensity significantly.

Abstract

In this paper, we design and simulate a terahertz (THz) controllable active plasmonic waveguide structure based on a single graphene layer that is placed on a random silicon grating substrate. Optical gain in the proposed THz active plasmonic waveguide structure is provided by the stimulated emission process in the photoexcited graphene monolayer that leads to the amplification of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waves. We use a random grating substrate to introduce Anderson localization of the SPP waves propagating through the graphene monolayer to enhance their optical amplification at resonant frequencies. It is shown that the enhancement factor of the resonant peaks corresponding to the graphene SPPs can be as high as 175. We also analyze their corresponding field intensity distributions along the graphene monolayer and find out that their intensities and localization positions are different from each other. By investigating the pump dependent and temperature dependent variations of the transmittance of the structure, it is shown that the resonant peak frequencies are blue-shifted by increasing the temperature and the external pump intensity. Also, we show that increasing the ambient temperature by 60 K can dramatically reduce the output amplified intensity by a factor of 70. This property of the proposed graphene-based THz plasmonic waveguide structure makes it useful in temperature sensing applications and on/off switchable laser devices.