Achievement

IGERT Fellow Jared Strait has fabricated single-atom-thick graphene plasmonic devices for use as tunable terahertz frequency filters, switches, sources, and detectors. These devices are nanostructured graphene strips, disks, and other shapes, which are engineered to support two-dimensional charge density waves (plasmons) at the graphene/insulator interface. Due to the unusual electronic energy structure of graphene, plasmon waves in graphene have terahertz frequencies and are easily tunable. Since these waves couple strongly to electromagnetic radiation, graphene plasmonic nanostructures are promising for novel active and passive devices in this difficult-to-access frequency range.