Four-wave mixing of topological edge plasmons in graphene metasurfaces.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32258407.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aaz3910 and PMC identifier 7101229.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
We study topologically protected four-wave mixing (FWM) interactions in a plasmonic metasurface consisting of a periodic array of nanoholes in a graphene sheet, which exhibits a wide topological bandgap at terahertz frequencies upon the breaking of time reversal symmetry by a static magnetic field. We demonstrate that due to the significant nonlinearity enhancement and large life time of graphene plasmons in specific configurations, a net gain of FWM interaction of plasmonic edge states located in the topological bandgap can be achieved with a pump power of less than 10 nW. In particular, we find that the effective nonlinear edge-waveguide coefficient is about γ ≃ 1.1 × 10<sup>13</sup> W<sup>-1</sup> m<sup>-1</sup>, i.e., more than 10 orders of magnitude larger than that of commonly used, highly nonlinear silicon photonic nanowires. These findings could pave a new way for developing ultralow-power-consumption, highly integrated, and robust active photonic systems at deep-subwavelength scale for applications in quantum communications and information processing.