A Tunable Spherical Graphene Spaser

Abstract

In this work, a new structure is suggested for spasing. The presented spaser is made up of a graphene nanosphere, which supports localized surface plasmon modes, and a quantum dot array, acting as a gain medium. The gain medium is pumped by an external laser source. Since all the plasmons are carried on a graphene platform, the structure features coherent surface plasmons with high confinement and large life time. All the structure is analyzed theoretically using full quantum mechanical description. The main advantage of the proposed spaser is the simple tuning capability of it by changing graphene Fermi level which is performed by either chemical doping in the manufacturing time or electrostatic gating. We suggest utilizing the proposed spaser for exciting coherent, long range surface plasmons on a graphene sheet. The near field of the spaser couples to the surface plasmons on graphene sheet and compensates the large momentum mismatch between surface plasmons and photons.