Naresh K. Emani

Broadband Light Bending with Plasmonic Nanoantennas

A plasmonic antenna array is used to control the propagation of a light beam across an interface. The precise manipulation of a propagating wave using phase control is a fundamental building block of optical systems. The wavefront of a light beam propagating across an interface can be modified arbitrarily by introducing abrupt phase changes. We experimentally demonstrated unparalleled wavefront control in a broadband optical wavelength range from 1.0 to 1.9 micrometers. This is accomplished by using an extremely thin plasmonic layer (~λ/50) consisting of an optical nanoantenna array that provides subwavelength phase manipulation on light propagating across the interface. Anomalous light-bending phenomena, including negative angles of refraction and reflection, are observed in the operational wavelength range.

Electrically tunable damping of plasmonic resonances with graphene.

Dynamic switching of a plasmonic resonance may find numerous applications in subwavelength optoelectronics, spectroscopy, and sensing. Graphene shows a highly tunable carrier concentration under electrostatic gating, and this could provide an effective route to achieving electrical control of the plasmonic resonance. In this Letter, we demonstrate electrical control of a plasmonic resonance at infrared frequencies using large-area graphene. Plasmonic structures fabricated on graphene enhance the interaction of the incident optical field with the graphene sheet, and the impact of graphene is much stronger at mid-infrared wavelengths. Full-wave simulations, where graphene is modeled as a 1 nm thick effective medium, show excellent agreement with experimental results.

Electrical Modulation of Fano Resonance in Plasmonic Nanostructures Using Graphene

Pauli blocking of interband transistions gives rise to tunable optical properties in single layer graphene (SLG). This effect is exploited in a graphene-nanoantenna hybrid device where Fano resonant plasmonic nanostructures are fabricated on top of a graphene sheet. The use of Fano resonant elements enhances the interaction of incident radiation with the graphene sheet and enables efficient electrical modulation of the plasmonic resonance. We observe electrically controlled damping in the Fano resonances occurring at approximately 2 μm, and the results are verified by full-wave 3D finite-element simulations. Our approach can be used for development of next generation of tunable plasmonic and hybrid nanophotonic devices.

Plasmonic Resonances in Nanostructured Transparent Conducting Oxide Films

Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) are emerging as possible alternative constituent materials to replace noble metals such as silver and gold for low-loss plasmonic and metamaterial (MM) applications in the near infrared regime (NIR). The optical characteristics of TCOs have been studied to evaluate the functionalities and potential of these materials as metal substitutes in plasmonic and MM devices, even apart from their usual use as electrode materials. However, patterning TCOs at the nanoscale, which is necessary for plasmonic and MM devices, is not well studied. This paper investigates nanopatterning processes for TCOs, especially the liftoff technique with electron-beam lithography, and the realization of plasmonic nanostructures with TCOs. By employing the developed nanopatterning process, we fabricate 2-D-periodic arrays of TCO nanodisks and characterize the materials plasmonic properties to evaluate the performance of TCOs as metal substitutes. Light-induced collective oscillations of the free electrons in the TCOs (bulk plasmons) and localized surface plasmon resonances are observed in the wavelength range from 1.6 to 2.1 μm. Well-defined resonance peaks are observed, which can be dramatically tuned by varying the amount of dopant and by thermally annealing the TCO nanodisks in nitrogen gas ambient while maintaining the low-loss properties.

Graphene: A Dynamic Platform for Electrical Control of Plasmonic Resonance

Abstract: Graphene has recently emerged as a viable platform for integrated optoelectronic and hybrid photonic devices because of its unique properties. The optical properties of graphene can be dynamically controlled by electrical voltage and have been used to modulate the plasmons in noble metal nanostructures. Graphene has also been shown to support highly confined intrinsic plasmons, with properties that can be tuned in the wavelength range of 2 μm to 100 μm. Here we review the recent development in graphene-plasmonic devices and identify some of the key challenges for practical applications of such hybrid devices.

Plasmon resonance in multilayer graphene nanoribbons

Plasmon resonances in nanopatterned single-layer graphene nanoribbons (SL-GNRs), double-layer graphene nanoribbons (DL-GNRs) and triple-layer graphene nanoribbons (TL-GNRs) are studied experimentally using ‘realistic’ graphene samples. The existence of electrically tunable plasmons in stacked multilayer graphene nanoribbons was first experimentally verified by infrared microscopy. We find that the strength of the plasmonic resonance increases in DL-GNRs when compared to SL-GNRs. However, further increase was not observed in TL-GNRs when compared to DL-GNRs. We carried out systematic full-wave simulations using a finite-element technique to validate and fit experimental results, and extract the carrier-scattering rate as a fitting parameter. The numerical simulations show remarkable agreement with experiments for an unpatterned SLG sheet, and a qualitative agreement for a patterned graphene sheet. We conclude with our perspective of the key bottlenecks in both experiments and theoretical models.

Second harmonic generation with plasmonic metasurfaces: direct comparison of electric and magnetic resonances

Plasmonic resonances in metallic nanostructures have been shown to drastically enhance local electromagnetic fields, and thereby increase the efficiency of nonlinear optical phenomena, such as second harmonic generation (SHG). While it has been experimentally observed that enhanced fields can significantly boost SHG, to date it proved difficult to probe electrical and magnetic resonances in one and the same nanostructure. This however is necessary to directly compare relative contributions of electrical and magnetic components of SHG enhancement. In this paper we report an experimental study of a metasurface capable of providing electrical and magnetic resonant SHG enhancement for TM polarization. Our metasurface could be engineered such that the peak frequencies of electrical and magnetic resonances could be adjusted independently. We used this feature to distinguish their relative contributions. Experimentally it was observed that the magnetic resonance provides only 50% as much enhancement to SHG as compared to the electric resonance. In addition aligning both resonances in frequency results in conversion efficiency of 1.32 x 10^(-10).

Plasmonics and metamaterials: looking beyond gold and silver

Conventional plasmonic devices have always used silver and gold as metallic components. Other areas of research such as metamaterials and transformation optics that rely on the plasmonic properties of materials also use noble metals as their metallic building blocks. However, these metals are not well-suited for many of the proposed device applications in the optical frequencies because of various problems, including large losses and nanofabrication issues. We show that alternative plasmonic materials such as transparent conducting oxides and transition metal nitrides overcome many of these challenges for metamaterial and plasmonic applications in the near-infrared and visible ranges.

Tunable Pulse-Shaping with Gated Graphene Nanoribbons

We propose a pulse-shaper made of gated graphene nanoribbons. Simulations demonstrate tunable control over the shapes of transmitted and reflected pulses using the gating bias. Initial fabrication and characterization of graphene elements is also discussed.

Tuning Fano resonances with graphene

We demonstrate strong electrical control of plasmonic Fano resonances in dolmen structures using tunable interband transitions in graphene. Such graphene-plasmonic hybrid devices can have applications in light modulation and sensing.