Probing graphene’s nonlocality with singular metasurfaces

Singular graphene metasurfaces, conductivity gratings realized by periodically suppressing the local doping level of a graphene sheet, were recently proposed to efficiently harvest THz light and couple it to surface plasmons over broad absorption bands, thereby achieving remarkably high field enhancement. However, the large momentum wavevectors thus attained are sensitive to the nonlocal behavior of the underlying electron liquid. Here, we extend the theory of singular graphene metasurfaces to account for the full nonlocal optical response of graphene and discuss the resulting impact on the plasmon resonance spectrum. Finally, we propose a simple local-analogue model that is able to reproduce the effect of nonlocality in local-response calculations by introducing a constant conductivity offset, which could prove a valuable tool in the modeling of more complex experimental graphene-based platforms.