Abstract-Optimized nonlinear terahertz response of graphene in a parallel-plate waveguide

APL Photonics

Parvin Navaeipour and Marc M. Dignam

The metallic parallel-plate waveguide with monolayer graphene inside forms the system being modelled. The inner material of the waveguide is polyolefin, and the graphene is placed at the center of the waveguide at y = b/2. The pump field propagates in the +z-direction and is polarized in the x-direction.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5045652

Third harmonic generation of terahertz radiation is expected to occur in monolayer graphene due to the nonlinear relationship between the crystal momentum and the current density. In this work, we calculate the terahertz nonlinear response of monolayer graphene inside a parallel-plate waveguide including pump depletion, self-phase, and cross-phase modulation. To overcome the phase mismatching between the pump field and third-harmonic field at high input fields due to self-phase and cross-phase modulation, we design a waveguide with two dielectric layers with different indices of refraction. We find that, by tuning the relative thicknesses of the two layers, we are able to improve phase matching and thereby increase the power efficiency of the system by more than a factor of two at high powers. With this approach, we find that despite the loss in this system, for an incident frequency of 2 THz, we are able to achieve power efficiencies of 75% for graphene with low Fermi energies of 20 meV and up to 35% when the Fermi energy is 100 meV.