Tunable plasmonic resonator using conductivity modulated Bragg reflectors

Abstract

We design a tunable plasmonic resonator that may have applications in sensing and plasmon generation—our design uses graphene-based Bragg reflectors of periodically modulated conductivity. Specifically, we explore and utilize the ability to use an array of Gaussian conductivity gratings as fully reflecting mirrors for surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) propagating along a two-dimensional graphene sheet sandwiched between two dielectric materials. Graphene supports SPPs in the near-infrared to terahertz (THz) regime of the electromagnetic spectrum compared to those observed in metal-dielectric systems. Our resonator is fundamentally different from other similar published resonator designs because the distributed reflectors provide light confinement in both the horizontal and the vertical directions. As a result, the resonator is compact in the vertical-direction as we no longer use traditional mirrors or dielectric assisted gratings. Besides, conventional resonator designs only support a single, fixed resonant frequency, set by the mirror reflectivity and the cavity material’s properties. The versatility of graphene is that its Fermi energy can be electrically varied, thus allowing us to change the peak reflectivity of the graphene Bragg-grating without physically changing its physical dimensions. Therefore, by varying the Bragg wavelength, we can shift the resonance frequency of the cavity. One use of our resonator is in plasmonic lasers. We illustrate this use by analyzing the resonator parameters such as the linewidth and the quality factor of the plasmonic resonator.