Plasmon–phonon coupling in graphene–hyperbolic bilayer heterostructures*

Polar dielectrics are important optical materials enabling the subwavelength manipulation of light in infrared due to their capability to excite phonon polaritons. In practice, it is highly desired to actively modify these hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPPs) to optimize or tune the response of the device. In this work, we investigate the plasmonic material, a monolayer graphene, and study its hybrid structure with three kinds of hyperbolic thin films grown on SiO2 substrate. The inter-mode hybridization and their tunability have been thoroughly clarified from both the band dispersions and the mode patterns numerically calculated through a transfer matrix method. Our results show that these hybrid multilayer structures are of strong potentials for applications in plasmonic waveguides, modulators and detectors in infrared.