Tunable Large Resonant Absorption in a Mid-IR Graphene Salisbury Screen

Abstract: Enhancing the interaction strength between graphene and light is an important objective for those seeking to make graphene a relevant material for future optoelectronic applications. Plasmonic modes in graphene offer an additional pathway of directing optical energy into the graphene sheet, while at the same time displaying dramatically small optical confinement factors that make them an interesting means of coupling light to atomic or molecular emitters. Here we show that graphene plasmonic nanoresonators can be placed a quarter wavelength from a reflecting surface and electronically tuned to mimic a surface with an impedance closely matched to freespace (Z0 = 377{\Omega}). This geometry - known in early radar applications as a Salisbury screen - allows for an order of magnitude (from 2.3 to 24.5%) increase of the optical absorption in the graphene and provides an efficient means of coupling to the highly confined graphene plasmonic modes.