Ultrabroadband, More than One Order Absorption Enhancement in Graphene with Plasmonic Light Trapping

This paper presents an comprehensive study of light trapping and absorption enhancement in graphene through metallic plasmonic structures and shows a strategy to realize both ultrabroadband and strong absorption enhancement. Three different plasmonic absorber designs are investigated by numerical simulations. The excitation of localized plasmons in the metallic structures significantly enhances the interactions between graphene and light at the resonances. By employing a splitted cross design for plasmonic resonant antennas and integrating two types of sub-antennas with different sizes, more than 30% of optical absorption in monolayer graphene is realized in a ultrabroad spectral range from 780 to 1760 nm. This enhancement functionality can be translated to any wavelength band from ultraviolet to terahertz ranges by modifying the geometric design of the plasmonic structure and can be applied for other two dimensional materials and their heterogeneous structures. It may significantly improve the efficiency of optical devices such as broadband photodetectors and solar cells based on graphene and other two-dimensional materials.