Graphene-based photonic crystal to steer giant Faraday rotation

We present a graphene-based photonic-crystal schematic of enhancing and steering Faraday rotation angle of graphene. This concept is counter-intuitive because the giant Faraday rotation and high transmission can be simultaneously pronounced, which is distinguished from exisitng graphene structures reported before. It is found that chemical potential can be tailored to generate a controllable giant Faraday rotation via graphene with atomic thickness. By engineering the individual component thickness in the photonic crystal, the magneto-optical performance can be significantly improved. This is of fundamental importance in a wide range of magneto-optical applications, simply because the Faraday rotation makes sense only when the transmittivity is decently high. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4729134]