Electrically tunable sub-diffraction photon confinement: a thin-film with circular graphene openings for optoelectronics applications

2023-6
Gündüz, Ozan Turhan
Some crucial questions like do gravitons exist or i.e., is there a way to handle the equations of Einstein to fully elaborate the gravitation phenomena by means of quantum mechanics have come into existence long time ago. There may not be answers for these questions yet but the related studies have given birth to significant quantum theories – which are QED and QFT – unifying electromagnetism to quantum mechanics. One of the challenging riddles that is set by light is whether do photons have wavefunctions like other elementary particles do? Wave-particle duality is a well-known fact since the first times of quantum mechanics thought, in electromagnetism, light is already a kind of undulation, so what about the probability then? Well, QFT has a reasonable explanation and supports the idea when they are accounted as fields of particles through second quantization, they do have wavefunctions of probability and this does not have anything to do with the classical wave oscillations. They can be accounted to the energy and momentum characteristics of harmonic oscillations resembling a similar behavior to classical harmonic oscillator which then has a wavefunction to solve associated Schrödinger equation. For the past half century, electrical engineering got the best out of these implications of QED and QFT by building better semiconductor technology with well miniaturized transistors and composite materials for digital electronics and optoelectronics fields. More importantly, these engineering applications has also greatly shifted towards hybrid fields like quantum computing that have introduced a completely new and unfamiliar world to electronics applications. The thesis benefits from the power of QFT to mathematically derive the bosonic modes (Laguerre-Gaussian) appear in circular aperture and the control of these propagation modes via the application of constant voltage over the surface of graphene layer at the end of the aperture. In this way, an array of these apertures may lead to a room temperature multi-qubit quantum gate which can isolate photon modes under diffraction.
Citation Formats
O. T. Gündüz, “Electrically tunable sub-diffraction photon confinement: a thin-film with circular graphene openings for optoelectronics applications,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2023.