Graphene-coated holey metal films: tunable molecular sensing by surface plasmon resonance

Nicolas Reckinger, Alexandru Vlad, Sorin Melinte, Jean-Francois Colomer, Michael Sarrazin

Published 2013-04-11, updated 2013-05-23Version 2

We report on the enhancement of surface plasmon resonances in a holey bidimensional grating of subwavelength size, drilled in a gold thin film coated by a graphene sheet. The enhancement originates from the coupling between charge carriers in graphene and gold surface plasmons. The main plasmon resonance peak is located around 1.5 microns. A lower constraint on the gold-induced doping concentration of graphene is specified and the interest of this architecture for molecular sensing is also highlighted.