Highly efficient plasmonic enhancement of graphene absorption at telecommunication wavelengths

A hybrid graphene system consisting of graphene and silica layers coated on a metal film with groove rings is proposed to strongly enhance light absorption in the graphene layer. Our results indicate that the excited localized plasmon resonance in groove rings can effectively improve the graphene absorption from 2.3% to 43.1%, even to a maximum value of 87.0% in five-layer graphene at telecommunication wavelengths. In addition, the absorption peak is strongly dependent on the groove depth and ring radius as well as the number of graphene layers, enabling the flexible selectivity of both the operating spectral position and bandwidth. This favorable enhancement and tunability of graphene absorption could provide a path toward high-performance graphene opto-electronic components, such as photodetectors. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America