Plasmons in highly doped graphene offer the means to dramatically enhance light absorption in the atomically thin material. Ultimately the absorbed light energy induces an increase in electron temperature, accompanied by large shifts in the chemical potential. This intrinsically incoherent effect leads to strong intensity-dependent modifications of the optical response, complementing the remarkable coherent nonlinearities arising in graphene due to interband transitions and anharmonic intraband electron motion. Through rigorous time-domain quantum-mechanical simulations of graphene nanoribbons, we show that the incoherent mechanism dominates over the coherent response for the high levels of intensity required to trigger nonperturbative optical phenomena such as saturable absorption. We anticipate that these findings will elucidate the role of coherent and incoherent nonlinearities for future studies and applications of plasmon-assisted nonlinear optics.

Peer Reviewed