Relaxing Graphene Plasmon Excitation Constraints Through the Use of an Epsilon-Near-Zero Substrate

Graphene plasmons have attracted significant attention due to their tunability, potentially long propagation lengths and ultracompact wavelengths. However, the latter characteristic imposes challenges to light-plasmon coupling in practical applications, generally requiring sophisticated coupling setups, extremely high doping levels and/or graphene nanostructuting close to the resolution limit of current lithography techniques. Here, we propose and theoretically demonstrate a method for alleviating such a technological strain through the use of a practical substrate whose low and negative dielectric function naturally enlarges the graphene polariton wavelength to more manageable levels. We consider silicon carbide (SiC), as it exhibits a dielectric function whose real part is between -1 and 0, while its imaginary part remains lower than 0.05, in the 951 to 970 cm$^-1$ mid-infrared spectral range. Our calculations show hybridization with the substrate's phonon polariton, resulting in a polariton wavelenth that is an order of magnitude longer than obtained with a silicon dioxide substrate, while the propagation length increases by the same amount.