Graphene-coated nanowire dimers for deep subwavelength waveguiding in mid-infrared range

In this paper, we show that the graphene-coated nanowire dimers could enable outstanding waveguiding performance in the mid-infrared range. The propagating properties of the fundamental graphene plasmon mode and their dependence on the nanowire radius, gap distance, nanowire permittivity and chemical potential of graphene are revealed in detail and compared with the graphene-coated circular nanowire. By improving the geometric parameters and the surface conductivity of graphene, the propagation length could reach about 9 μm, which is larger than that of the graphene-coated circular nanowire plasmon mode. Meanwhile, the effective mode area is only 10^-4A₀, which is one order of magnitude smaller than that of the graphene-coated circular nanowire plasmon mode. Theoretically, the propagation length could be further enhanced by increasing the chemical potential. Besides, the proposed graphene-coated nanowire dimers show quite good fabrication tolerance. The manipulation of mid-infrared waves at the deep subwavelength scale using graphene plasmons may offer potential applications in tunable integrated nanophotonic devices and infrared sensing.