Emission and amplification of surface plasmons in resonant - tunneling van der Waals heterostructures

Abstract

We predict a new mechanism of surface plasmon amplification in graphene-insulator-graphene van der Waals heterostructures. The amplification occurs upon the stimulated interlayer electron tunneling accompanied by the emission of a coherent plasmon. The quantum-mechanical calculations of the non-local high-frequency tunnel conductivity show that a relative smallness of the tunneling exponent can be compensated by a strong resonance due to the enhanced tunneling between electron states with collinear momenta in the neighboring graphene layers. With the optimal selection of the barrier layer, the surface plasmon gain due to the inelastic tunneling can compensate or even exceed the loss due to both Drude and interband absorption. The tunneling emission of the surface plasmons is robust against a slight twist of the graphene layers and might explain the electroluminescence from the tunnel-coupled graphene layers observed in the recent experiments.

10 pages, 3 figures

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• Plasmon-assisted resonant tunneling in graphene-based heterostructures
• Electrical plasmon injection in double-layer graphene heterostructures
• Plasmons in realistic graphene/hexagonal boron nitride moiré patterns
• Plasmon generation through electron tunneling in twisted double-layer graphene and metal-insulator-graphene systems
• Terahertz plasmonic resonances in coplanar graphene nanoribbon structures
• Thermoelectric detection of propagating plasmons in graphene
• Electrically driven plasmon-polaritonic bistability in Dirac electron tunneling transistors
• Influence of the electron spill-out and nonlocality on gap-plasmons in the limit of vanishing gaps