Extraordinary absorption of decorated undoped graphene

Abstract

We theoretically study absorption by an undoped graphene layer decorated with arrays of small particles. We discuss periodic and random arrays within a common formalism, which predicts a maximum absorption of $50\%$ for suspended graphene in both cases. The limits of weak and strong scatterers are investigated and an unusual dependence on particle-graphene separation is found and explained in terms of the effective number of contributing evanescent diffraction orders of the array. Our results can be important to boost absorption by single layer graphene due to its simple setup with potential applications to light harvesting and photodetection based on energy (F\"orster) rather than charge transfer.