Optical Faraday rotation with graphene

Abstract

Plane polarized electromagnetic waves propagating through a dielectric medium parallel to a magnetic field undergo Faraday rotation (FR) of their polarization. “Giant” Faraday rotation by as much as 0.1 rad was recently observed for terahertz waves with graphene over a SiC substrate. We show that for the (more technologically useful) optical frequency range, the same effect may be achieved with interband transitions between Landau levels formed by application of real or pseudo-magnetic fields induced by strain. At some resonant condition, the FR angle shows a sharp transition and sign reversal, which may be used to rotate the polarizations of the sodium doublet D-lines so as to be perpendicular to each other.

Strong enhancement of Faraday rotation using one-dimensional conjugated photonic crystals containing graphene layers

“…Furthermore, graphene has potential applications in transformation optics and plasmonics [9][10][11]. Recently, it has been theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that graphene can be a good candidate in magneto-optics [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. The Faraday effect is one of the famous magneto-optical effects in which the polarization plane of light propagating through either a metal or a dielectric rotates in the presence of an external magnetic field along the propagation direction.…”

“…In conventional magneto-optical materials, the amount of Faraday rotation (FR) angle is proportional to the traveling distance of the light through the medium. It is expected that the FR in graphene with a thin atomic thickness is of the order of the fine structure constant due to the coupling between surface currents and the electromagnetic waves [12,13]. However, unlike usual magnetic materials, graphene shows a large FR.…”

“…However, unlike usual magnetic materials, graphene shows a large FR. This effect is attributed to the resonance between intra-Landaulevel transition and the energy of the incident wave [13]. For the first time, Crassee et al demonstrated that graphene grown on the SiC substrate can rotate the polarization by several degrees in the presence of 1559-128X/14/368374-07$15.00/0 © 2014 Optical Society of America modest magnetic fields [12].…”

Quantized Faraday effect in (3+1)-dimensional and (2+1)-dimensional systems

“…(9) and (10) are given as imaginary parts of the scalars r and t respectively. At frequencies different from zero the integrals (12) and (15) have singularities which come from the zeros of the denominator D. But the Hall conductivity is the imaginary part of r = iI r , thus the contribution to the Hall conductivity comes from the real part of I r , which means to consider the principal value of the integral [see the appendix, first term of (A39)]. The result is the following:…”

“…Our results for 2D+1 massless system are in agreement with previous theoretical work for FR in graphene reported in Refs. [12]- [14]. The 2D+1 results have been obtained from 3D+1 results by dimensional compactification.…”