Graphene Metamaterial Embedded within Bundt Optenna for Ultra-Broadband Infrared Enhanced Absorption

Abstract

Graphene is well-known for its extraordinary physical properties such as broadband optical absorption, high electron mobility, and electrical conductivity. All of these make it an excellent candidate for several infrared applications such as photodetection, optical modulation, and optical sensing. However, a standalone monolayer graphene still suffers from a weak infrared absorption, which is ≅2.3%. In this work, a novel configuration of graphene metamaterial embedded inside Bundt optical-antenna (optenna) is demonstrated. It can leverage the graphene absorption up to 57.7% over an ultra-wide wavelength range from 1.26 to 1.68 µm (i.e., Bandwidth ≅ 420 nm). This range covers the entire optical communication bands of O, E, S, C, L, and U. The configuration mainly consists of a Bundt-shaped plasmonic antenna with a graphene metamaterial stack embedded within its nano-wide waveguide that has a 1.5 µm length. The gold average plasmonic loss is ≅25%. This configuration can enhance graphene ultra-broadband absorption through multiple mechanisms. It can nano-focus the infrared radiation down to a 50 nm spot on the graphene metamaterial, thus yielding an 11.5 gain in optical intensity (i.e., 10.6 dB). The metamaterial itself has seven concentric cylindrical graphene layers separated by silicon dioxide thin films, thus each layer contributes to the overall absorption. The focused infrared propagates tangential to the graphene metamaterial layers (i.e., grazing propagation), and thus maximizes the light–graphene interaction length. In addition, each graphene layer experiences a double-face exposure to the nano-focused propagating spot, which increases each layer’s absorption. This configuration is compact and polarization-insensitive. The estimated maximum absorption enhancement compared to the standalone monolayer graphene was 25.1 times (i.e., ≅4 dB). The estimated maximum absorption coefficient of the graphene stack was 5700 cm−1, which is considered as one of the record-high reported coefficients up to date.