Plasmon-assisted high-harmonic generation in graphene

Abstract

High-harmonic generation (HHG) in condensed-matter systems is both a source of fundamental insight into quantum electron motion and a promising candidate to realize compact ultraviolet and ultrafast light sources. Here we argue that the large light intensity required for this phenomenon to occur can be reached by exploiting localized plasmons in conducting nanostructures. In particular, we demonstrate that doped graphene nanostructures combine a strong plasmonic near-field enhancement and a pronounced intrinsic nonlinearity that result in efficient broadband HHG within a single material platform. We extract this conclusion from time-domain simulations using two complementary nonperturbative approaches based on atomistic one-electron density-matrix and massless Dirac-fermion Bloch-equation pictures. High harmonics are predicted to be emitted with unprecedentedly large intensity by tuning the incident light to the localized plasmons of ribbons and finite islands. In contrast to atomic systems, we observe no cutoff in harmonic order. Our results support the strong potential of nanostructured graphene as a robust, electrically tunable platform for HHG.

8 pages, 5 figures

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• Nonlinear atom-plasmon interactions enabled by nanostructured graphene
• Insight into High-order Harmonic Generation from Solids: The Contributions of the Bloch Wave-packets Moving on the Group and Phase Velocities
• Quasiclassical nonlinear plasmon resonance in graphene
• Iterative approach to arbitrary nonlinear optical response functions of graphene
• Digitally Programmable Higher-order Harmonic Generation Using Nonlinear MEMS Resonator
• Study of electron emission from 1D nanomaterials under super high field