Unusual reflection of electromagnetic radiation from a stack of graphene layers at oblique incidence

Abstract

We study the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) radiation with single-layer graphene and a stack of parallel graphene sheets at arbitrary angles of incidence. It is found that the behavior is qualitatively different for transverse magnetic (or p-polarized) and transverse electric (or s-polarized) waves. In particular, the absorbance of single-layer graphene attains minimum (maximum) for p (s) polarization, at the angle of total internal reflection when the light comes from a medium with a higher dielectric constant. In the case of equal dielectric constants of the media above and beneath graphene, for grazing incidence graphene is almost 100% transparent to p-polarized waves and acts as a tunable mirror for the s-polarization. These effects are enhanced for the stack of graphene sheets, so the system can work as a broad band polarizer. It is shown further that a periodic stack of graphene layers has the properties of an one-dimensional photonic crystal, with gaps (or stop--bands) at certain frequencies. When an incident EM wave is reflected from this photonic crystal, the tunability of the graphene conductivity renders the possibility of controlling the gaps, and the structure can operate as a tunable spectral--selective mirror.

11 pages, 12 figures, accepted for Journal of Optics

References in corpus (22)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Universal Dynamic Conductivity and Quantized Visible Opacity of Suspended Graphene
• Measurement of the Optical Conductivity of Graphene
• Manipulating infrared photons using plasmons in transparent graphene superlattices
• Colloquium: The transport properties of graphene: An introduction
• Universal dynamical conductance in graphite
• Optical far-infrared properties of graphene monolayer and multilayers
• The optical conductivity of graphene in the visible region of the spectrum
• Excitonic Effects on the Optical Response of Graphene and Bilayer Graphene
• Giant Faraday rotation in single- and multilayer graphene
• Electronic transport in graphene: A semi-classical approach including midgap states
• A Primer on Surface Plasmon-Polaritons in Graphene
• Novel hyperbolic metamaterials based on multilayer graphene structures
• Magnetic field tuning of terahertz Dirac plasmons in graphene
• On the universal AC optical background in graphene
• Conductivity of suspended and non-suspended graphene at finite gate voltage
• Tunable graphene-based polarizer
• Excitonic effects in the optical conductivity of gated graphene
• Graphene-based polaritonic crystal
• Enhancing the absorption of graphene in the terahertz range
• Graphene-based photonic crystal
• Enhancing visibility of graphene on arbitrary substrates by microdroplet condensation

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Graphene based functional devices: A short review
• Hyperbolic hybrid waves and optical topological transitions in few-layer anisotropic metasurfaces
• Extraordinary localization of TE-waves at the graphene layer
• From surface to volume plasmons in hyperbolic metamaterials: General existence conditions for bulk high-k waves in metal-dielectric and graphene-dielectric multilayers
• Discrete solitons in graphene metamaterials
• Impact of graphene on the polarizability of a neighbour nanoparticle: a dyadic Green's function study
• Scattering of surface plasmon-polaritons in a graphene multilayer photonic crystal with inhomogeneous doping
• Anderson localization of light in disordered superlattices containing graphene layers
• Many-body theory for proton-induced point-defect effects on losses of electron energy and photons in quantum wells
• Intrinsic and extrinsic effects on intraband optical conductivity of hot carriers in photoexcited graphene
• Hyperbolic phonon-plasmon polaritons in a hBN-graphene van der Waals structure
• Current-induced nonreciprocity and refraction-free propagation in a one-dimensional graphene-based photonic crystal