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All-Optical Generation of Surface Plasmons in Graphene (1505.00127v2)
Published 1 May 2015 in physics.optics and cond-mat.mes-hall
Abstract: Here we present an all-optical plasmon coupling scheme, utilising the intrinsic nonlinear optical response of graphene. We demonstrate coupling of free-space, visible light pulses to the surface plasmons in a planar, un-patterned graphene sheet by using nonlinear wave mixing to match both the wavevector and energy of the surface wave. By carefully controlling the phase-matching conditions, we show that one can excite surface plasmons with a defined wavevector and direction across a large frequency range, with an estimated photon efficiency in our experiments approaching $10{-5}$.