GRAPHENE PLASMONICS FOR ADVANCED NANOPHOTONIC APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Graphene plasmonics has recently become one of the major research fields in nanophotonics showing many promises for future applications. However, still many challenges exist in addressing new methods for applying graphene plasmonics for potential future application and its effective characterization. In this thesis, taking advantage of graphene’s Dirac plasmon and its main advantages, i.e., extreme confinement and tunability, different routes have been established to electrically tunable optical devices which can be dynamically controlled for various applications such as nanoparticle manipulation. This work successfully proposes a promising avenue toward reconfigurable manipulation of optical potentials, and goes beyond optical tweezers for micron-sized particles and nanoplasmonic tweezers towards the sub-nm range. It also addresses the challenges in characterization of graphene plasmonic nanostructures by analyzing two major state of art characterization methods, scattering type scanning near field optical microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy and their optical responses in 2D material characterization.