On the effect of width of metallic armchair graphene nanoribbons in plasmonic waveguide applications

Graphene demonstrates superior electronic properties that make it a potential candidate for future electronic systems. Graphene, additionally, support surface plasmon oscillations, which in turn makes graphene attractive for optoelectronics because of its planar structure and its conductivity properties. When a graphene layer is confined in one dimension, a graphene nanoribbon arises, with proerties differing from the original two dimensional graphene. In this paper we study the main properties of plasmon oscillations on metallic armchair graphene nanoribbons using the dielectric function obtained through the random phase approximation. We mainly study the effect of the graphene nanoribbon width on the plasmon propagation length using numerical techniques to extract the dispersion relation of graphene nanoribbons and the propagation properties of palsmons on graphene nanoribbons. © 2012 IEEE.