Tetiana M. Slipchenko

Strong Plasmon Reflection at Nanometer-Size Gaps in Monolayer Graphene on SiC

We employ tip-enhanced infrared near-field microscopy to study the plasmonic properties of epitaxial quasi-free-standing monolayer graphene on silicon carbide. The near-field images reveal propagating graphene plasmons, as well as a strong plasmon reflection at gaps in the graphene layer, which appear at the steps between the SiC terraces. When the step height is around 1.5 nm, which is two orders of magnitude smaller than the plasmon wavelength, the reflection signal reaches 20% of its value at graphene edges, and it approaches 50% for step heights as small as 5 nm. This intriguing observation is corroborated by numerical simulations and explained by the accumulation of a line charge at the graphene termination. The associated electromagnetic fields at the graphene termination decay within a few nanometers, thus preventing efficient plasmon transmission across nanoscale gaps. Our work suggests that plasmon propagation in graphene-based circuits can be tailored using extremely compact nanostructures, such as ultranarrow gaps. It also demonstrates that tip-enhanced near-field microscopy is a powerful contactless tool to examine nanoscale defects in graphene.

Analytical solution for the diffraction of an electromagnetic wave by a graphene grating

An analytical method for diffraction of a plane electromagnetic wave at a periodically modulated graphene sheet is presented. Both interface corrugation and a periodic change in the optical conductivity are considered. Explicit expressions for reflection, transmission, absorption and transformation coefficients in arbitrary diffraction orders are presented. The dispersion relation and decay rates for graphene plasmons of the grating are found. Simple analytical expressions for the value of the bandgap in the vicinity of the first Brillouin zone edge are derived. The optimal amplitude and wavelength, guaranteeing the best matching of the incident light with graphene plasmons are found for the conductivity grating. The analytical results are in a good agreement with first-principles numeric simulations.

Electrically controlled terahertz magneto-optical phenomena in continuous and patterned graphene

The magnetic circular dichroism and the Faraday rotation are the fundamental phenomena of great practical importance arising from the breaking of the time reversal symmetry by a magnetic field. In most materials, the strength and the sign of these effects can be only controlled by the field value and its orientation. Furthermore, the terahertz range is lacking materials having the ability to affect the polarization state of the light in a non-reciprocal manner. Here we demonstrate, using broadband terahertz magneto-electro-optical spectroscopy, that in graphene both the magnetic circular dichroism and the Faraday rotation can be modulated in intensity, tuned in frequency and, importantly, inverted using only electrostatic doping at a fixed magnetic field. In addition, we observe strong magneto-plasmonic resonances in a patterned array of graphene antidots, which potentially allows exploiting these magneto-optical phenomena in a broad THz range.

Hysteretic jumps in the response of layered superconductors to electromagnetic fields

We consider here a layered superconductor subject to an externally applied moderately-strong electromagnetic field. We predict hysteretic jumps in the dependence of the surface reactance of the superconductor on the amplitude H0 of the incident electromagnetic wave. This very unusual nonlinear phenomenon can be observed in thin superconducting slabs at not very strong ac amplitudes, if the frequency of the irradiating field is close to the Josephson plasma frequency. Using the ~ � � ,