Giant frequency tunability enabled by external magnetic and a gate electric fields in graphene devices

Graphene possesses a unique Landau level system that is non-equidistantly spaced in energy, as thus a large amount of optical transitions may become possible. Here, by utilizing this unique feature, we propose a novel dual field method which combines both external magnetic field and gate electric field together to control the optical response of the graphene-based devices. The key principle of this method is to selectively allow different optical transitions in graphene among Landau levels via an electric gate tuning of the Fermi level. By applying this method to a graphene based amplitude modulator and through an implementation based on transfer matrix method, we numerically demonstrated the well characteristics of switchable modulation on four individual channels, a huge modulation depth up to 80 dB and an extremely low required energy of tuning Fermi level down to 10 meV. Such excellent frequency tunability and gate controlling ability of this dual field method may open up the potential for applications in active optoelectronics, spin optics, ultrafast optics and etc.