Control of terahertz nonlinear transmission with electrically gated graphene metadevices

Abstract

Graphene, which is a two-dimensional crystal of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, has attracted a great amount of attention due to its outstanding mechanical, thermal and electronic properties. Moreover, graphene shows an exceptionally strong tunable light-matter interaction that depends on the Fermi level - a function of chemical doping and external gate voltage - and the electromagnetic resonance provided by intentionally engineered structures. In the optical regime, the nonlinearities of graphene originated from the Pauli blocking have already been exploited for mode-locking device applications in ultrafast laser technology, whereas nonlinearities in the terahertz regime, which arise from a reduction in conductivity due to carrier heating, have only recently been confirmed experimentally. Here, we investigated two key factors for controlling nonlinear interactions of graphene with an intense terahertz field. The induced transparencies of graphene can be controlled effectively by engineering meta-atoms and/or changing the number of charge carriers through electrical gating. Additionally, nonlinear phase changes of the transmitted terahertz field can be observed by introducing the resonances of the meta-atoms.