Towards Infrared Plasmonics in Graphene

Graphene plasmons have recently been proposed as an alternative to noble-metal plasmons in the field of photonics, due to its extremely tight light confinement, relatively long-lived collective oscillation, and high tunability via electrostatic gating. Successful support and tuning of graphene plasmonic modes rely on controllable doping of graphene to high carrier densities in nanometer-scale structures. In this thesis, an experimental approach to generating nanoscale spatial carrier density modulation of graphene using electrolyte gates and crosslinked-PMMA screen is proposed and investigated. The increased optical absorption in the infrared region due to plasmon resonances induced by the proposed scheme is numerically studied. We then present the fabrication technique of the proposed scheme for various nanostructure geometries. Finally, we provide an outlook of future studies of graphene plasmonics, including plasmon excitation with solid-state cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). Thesis Supervisor: Dirk R. Englund Title: Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science