Enhanced Optical Dichroism of Graphene Nanoribbons

Abstract

The optical conductivity of graphene nanoribbons is analytical and exactly derived. It is shown that the absence of translation invariance along the transverse direction allows considerable intra-band absorption in a narrow frequency window that varies with the ribbon width, and lies in the THz range domain for ribbons 10-100nm wide. In this spectral region the absorption anisotropy can be as high as two orders of magnitude, which renders the medium strongly dichroic, and allows for a very high degree of polarization (up to ~85) with just a single layer of graphene. The effect is resilient to level broadening of the ribbon spectrum potentially induced by disorder. Using a cavity for impedance enhancement, or a stack of few layer nanoribbons, these values can reach almost 100%. This opens a potential prospect of employing graphene ribbon structures as efficient polarizers in the far IR and THz frequencies.

Revised version. 10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (23)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• The electronic properties of graphene
• Universal Dynamic Conductivity and Quantized Visible Opacity of Suspended Graphene
• Half-Metallic Graphene Nanoribbons
• Micrometer-scale ballistic transport in encapsulated graphene at room temperature
• All-graphene integrated circuits via strain engineering
• Colloquium: The transport properties of graphene: An introduction
• Universal dynamical conductance in graphite
• Controlling electron-phonon interactions in graphene at ultra high carrier densities
• The optical conductivity of graphene in the visible region of the spectrum
• Current-induced cleaning of graphene
• Drude Conductivity of Dirac Fermions in Graphene
• Energy gaps in etched graphene nanoribbons
• Conductance quantization and transport gap in disordered graphene nanoribbons
• Coulomb blockade in graphene nanoribbons
• Determination of the electronic structure of bilayer graphene from infrared spectroscopy results
• Etching of Graphene Devices with a Helium Ion Beam
• Infrared spectroscopy of electronic bands in bilayer graphene
• Mechanism for graphene-based optoelectronic switches by tuning surface plasmon-polaritons in monolayer graphene
• Graphene Transport at High Carrier Densities using a Polymer Electrolyte Gate
• Excitonic effects in the optical conductivity of gated graphene
• Spectrum of pi electrons in bilayer graphene nanoribbons and nanotubes: an analytical approach
• Band structure asymmetry of bilayer graphene revealed by infrared spectroscopy

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Unusual reflection of electromagnetic radiation from a stack of graphene layers at oblique incidence
• Graphene properties from curved space Dirac equation
• Tunable plasmon-enhanced birefringence in ribbon array of anisotropic 2D materials
• Optical conductivity of curved graphene
• Graphene, Dirac equation and analogue gravity
• Optical Dichroism by Nonlinear Excitations in Graphene Nanoribbons
• Quantum Field Theory Approach to the Optical Conductivity of Strained and Deformed Graphene
• Terahertz Generation and Amplification in Graphene Nanoribbons in Multi-frequency Electric Fields
• Large displacement strain theory and its application to graphene
• Appearance of Negative Differential Conductivity in Graphene Nanoribbons at High-Harmonics