Abstract-Extraordinary Control of Terahertz Beam Reflectance in Graphene Electro-absorption Modulators

 

http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/nanotation/pipe/abs/10.1021/nl3016329

Berardi Sensale-Rodriguez *†, Rusen Yan †‡, Subrina Rafique †, Mingda Zhu †, Wei Li ‡§, Xuelei Liang §,David Gundlach ‡, Vladimir Protasenko †, Michelle M. Kelly †, Debdeep Jena †, Lei Liu †, and Huili Grace Xing *†

^† Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, United States

^‡ Semiconductor and Dimensional Metrology Division,National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, United States

^§ Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

Nano Lett., Article ASAP

DOI: 10.1021/nl3016329

Publication Date (Web): August 3, 2012

Copyright © 2012 American Chemical Society

*E-mail address: bsensale@nd.edu; hxing@nd.edu

 

We demonstrate a graphene-based electro-absorption modulator achieving extraordinary control of terahertz reflectance. By concentrating the electric field intensity in an active layer of graphene, an extraordinary modulation depth of 64% is achieved while simultaneously exhibiting low insertion loss (2 dB), which is remarkable since the active region of the device is atomically thin. This modulator performance, among the best reported to date, indicates the enormous potential of graphene for terahertz reconfigurable optoelectronic devices.