OP: High Accuracy Modeling of Graphene Plasmonics in Three Dimensional Grating Structures

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Since it was first isolated experimentally in 2004, graphene (a single layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice) has transformed the fields of plasmonics and photonics. Graphene has remarkable mechanical, chemical, and electronic properties, and is finding its way into devices of engineering interest from communications and military capabilities to medical sciences and biological sensing. Of particular note is graphene's semi-metallic character which permits one to tune its electrical properties. It is not surprising that extensive investigation of graphene has been conducted in the engineering community, however, there is very little to report in the applied mathematics literature. There is an opportunity to make valuable contributions. The goal of this project is to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for the study of graphene in grating structures and to describe a computational framework for highly accurate simulation of these models. With these, the project aims to guide the design of engineers to deliver devices of interest in a greatly expedited fashion. The family of High-Order Perturbation of Surfaces (HOPS) methods, which the Principal Investigator has developed over the past decade, are an ideal choice for the model at hand. However, further algorithmic enhancements and extensions are required to produce tools which will continue to be useful to practitioners. In particular, the project will advance the state of the art in the modeling, numerical simulation, and design of grating structures featuring two-dimensional materials with the following objectives: (1) While materials such as graphene have been incorporated into the existing models in two-dimensional, scalar configurations, these efforts must be extended to the case of three-dimensional vector electromagnetic simulations; (2) The Method of Transformed Field Expansions (TFE) is a stabilized HOPS algorithm with which one can not only derive rigorous existence, uniqueness, and analyticity results, but also provide highly accurate numerical approximations, and these recursions must be extended to the three-dimensional vector electromagnetic case; (3) The surface formulations advocated by the PI are affected by the choice of surface integral operator relating Dirichlet and Neumann traces, and the project will investigate the performance of Impedance-Impedance Operators which are free of the "Dirichlet Eigenvalues" which plague the straightforward Dirichlet-Neumann Operators used in previous implementations; (4) the PI and collaborators recently studied the statistical properties of scattering by random rough gratings and will include two-dimensional materials in three-dimensional structures into this framework as part of the project; and (5) In addition to using these HOPS methods to identify grating structures featuring graphene, the project also aims to design them for optimal performance. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.