Abstract-Terahertz plasmon-polariton modes in graphene driven by electric field inside a Fabry-Pérot cavity

C. X. Zhao¹, W. Xu^1,2,a), L. L. Li¹, C. Zhang¹ and F. M. Peeters³

 VIEW AFFILIATIONS
a) Electronic mail: wenxu_issp@aliyun.com
J. Appl. Phys. 117, 223104 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4922401

We present a theoretical study on plasmon-polariton modes in graphene placed inside anoptical cavity and driven by a source-to-drain electric field. The electron velocity and electron temperature are determined by solving self-consistently the momentum- and energy-balance equations in which electron interactions with impurities, acoustic-, and optic-phonons are included. Based on many-body self-consistent field theory, we develop a tractable approach to study plasmon-polariton in an electron gas system. We find that when graphene is placed inside a Fabry-Pérot cavity, two branches of the plasmon-polariton modes can be observed and these modes are very much optic- or plasmon-like. The frequencies of these modes depend markedly on driving electric field especially at higher resonant frequency regime. Moreover, the plasmon-polariton frequency in graphene is in terahertz (THz) bandwidth and can be tuned by changing the cavity length, gate voltage, and driving electric field. This work is pertinent to the application of graphene-based structures as tunable THz plasmonic devices.