Towards photodetection with high efficiency and tunable spectral selectivity: graphene plasmonics for light trapping and absorption engineering

Plasmonics can be used to improve absorption in optoelectronic devices and has been intensively studied for solar cells and photodetectors. Graphene has recently emerged as a powerful plasmonic material. It shows significantly less loss compared to traditional plasmonic materials such as gold and silver and its plasmons can be tuned by changing the Fermi energy with chemical or electrical doping. Here we propose the use of graphene plasmonics for light trapping in optoelectronic devices and show that the excitation of localized plasmons in doped, nanostructured graphene can enhance optical absorption in its surrounding medium including both bulky and two-dimensional materials by tens of times, which may lead to a new generation of photodetectors with high efficiency and tunable spectral selectivity in the mid-infrared and THz ranges.