Tunable optical bistability of dielectric/nonlinear graphene/dielectric heterostructures

Abstract

We have established the theoretical relation of nonlinear optical response with respect to the dielectric/nonlinear graphene/dielectric heterostructures and further demonstrated the tunable optical bistability at terahertz frequencies. It is shown that the hysteretic behavior is strongly dependent on the Fermi energy of graphene, and the threshold electric fields could be correspondingly adjusted with the continuous tuning of Fermi Energy level. It is clear that the bistable thresholds can be lowered dramatically by decreasing the Fermi energy of graphene, at the same time the optical hysteresis width is narrowed. Moreover, we have confirmed that the optical bistability can be tuned by adjusting the incident illumination angle, or by varying the thickness and permittivity of the dielectric slabs. Our contribution might provide a new avenue of fabricating graphene based optical switching device that could even operate at terahertz regime.