No Arabic abstract
Graphene is a promising candidate for optoelectronic applications such as photodetectors, terahertz imagers, and plasmonic devices. The origin of photoresponse in graphene junctions has been studied extensively and is attributed to either thermoelectric or photovoltaic effects. In addition, hot carrier transport and carrier multiplication are thought to play an important role. Here we report the intrinsic photoresponse in biased but otherwise homogeneous graphene. In this classic photoconductivity experiment, the thermoelectric effects are insignificant. Instead, the photovoltaic and a photo-induced bolometric effect dominate the photoresponse due to hot photocarrier generation and subsequent lattice heating through electron-phonon cooling channels respectively. The measured photocurrent displays polarity reversal as it alternates between these two mechanisms in a backgate voltage sweep. Our analysis yields elevated electron and phonon temperatures, with the former an order higher than the latter, confirming that hot electrons drive the photovoltaic response of homogeneous graphene near the Dirac point.
We study, within the tight-binding approximation, the electronic properties of a graphene bilayer in the presence of an external electric field applied perpendicular to the system -- emph{biased bilayer}. The effect of the perpendicular electric field is included through a parallel plate capacitor model, with screening correction at the Hartree level. The full tight-binding description is compared with its 4-band and 2-band continuum approximations, and the 4-band model is shown to be always a suitable approximation for the conditions realized in experiments. The model is applied to real biased bilayer devices, either made out of SiC or exfoliated graphene, and good agreement with experimental results is found, indicating that the model is capturing the key ingredients, and that a finite gap is effectively being controlled externally. Analysis of experimental results regarding the electrical noise and cyclotron resonance further suggests that the model can be seen as a good starting point to understand the electronic properties of graphene bilayer. Also, we study the effect of electron-hole asymmetry terms, as the second-nearest-neighbor hopping energies $t$ (in-plane) and $gamma_{4}$ (inter-layer), and the on-site energy $Delta$.
Graphene is a 2-dimensional material with high carrier mobility and thermal conductivity, suitable for high-speed electronics. Conduction and valence bands touch at the Dirac point. The absorptivity of single-layer graphene is 2.3%, nearly independent of wavelength. Here we investigate the thermal radiation from biased graphene transistors. We find that the emission spectrum of single-layer graphene follows that of a grey body with constant emissivity (1.6 pm 0.8)%. Most importantly, we can extract the temperature distribution in the ambipolar graphene channel, as confirmed by Stokes/anti-Stokes measurements. The biased graphene exhibits a temperature maximum whose location can be controlled by the gate voltage. We show that this peak in temperature reveals the spatial location of the minimum in carrier density, i.e. the Dirac point.
Graphene is a unique material to study fundamental limits of plasmonics. Apart from the ultimate single-layer thickness, its carrier concentration can be tuned by chemical doping or applying an electric field. In this manner the electrodynamic properties of graphene can be varied from highly conductive to dielectric. Graphene supports strongly confined, propagating surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) in a broad spectral range from terahertz to mid-infrared frequencies. It also possesses a strong magneto-optical response and thus provides complimentary architectures to conventional magneto-plasmonics based on magneto-optically active metals or dielectrics. Despite of a large number of review articles devoted to plasmonic properties and applications of graphene, little is known about graphene magneto-plasmonics and topological effects in graphene-based nanostructures, which represent the main subject of this review. We discuss several strategies to enhance plasmonic effects in topologically distinct closed surface landscapes, i.e. graphene nanotubes, cylindric nanocavities and toroidal nanostructures. A novel phenomenon of the strongly asymmetric SPP propagation on chiral meta-structures and fundamental relations between structural and plasmonic topological indices are reviewed.
Graphene is a rising star in nonlinear optics due to its saturable absorption and giant Kerr nonlinearity, these properties are useful in digital optics based on optical nonlinear devices. However, practical applications require large optical nonlinearities and these are inherently limited by the interaction length of atomically thin graphene. Here, we demonstrate optical bistability in a Fabry Perot cavity containing monolayer and bilayer graphene which have been restructured to form nanobubbles. We find that graphene nanobubble can act as a new type of optical nonlinear media due to its vertical side wall as well as added curvature, which enable strong non linear dispersive effects leading to a large optically induced phase change. Unlike thermally induced bistability, the all optical switching between two transmission states happens within a time scale of tens of nanoseconds. Nanobubble based optical devices with intrinsic optical nonlinearity help to overcome the optical path length limitation of atomically thin two dimensional films and allow us to explore the promise of using such elements as the building block of digital all-optical circuitry.
Oscillator-strength sum rule in light-induced transitions is one general form of quantum-mechanical identities. Although this sum rule is well established in equilibrium photo-physics, an experimental corroboration for the validation of the sum rule in a nonequilibrium regime has been a long-standing unexplored question. The simple band structure of graphene is an ideal system for investigating this question due to the linear Dirac-like energy dispersion. Here, we employed both ultrafast terahertz and optical spectroscopy to directly monitor the transient oscillator-strength balancing between quasi-free low-energy oscillators and high-energy Fermi-edge ones. Upon photo-excitation of hot Dirac fermions, we observed that the ultrafast depletion of high-energy oscillators precisely complements the increased terahertz absorption oscillators. Our results may provide an experimental priori to understand, for example, the intrinsic free-carrier dynamics to the high-energy photo-excitation, responsible for optoelectronic operation such as graphene-based phototransistor or solar-energy harvesting devices.