UV active plasmons in alkali and alkaline earth intercalated graphene

The interband pi and pi+sigma plasmons in pristine graphene and the Dirac plasmon in doped graphene are not applicable, since they are broad or weak, and weakly couple to an external longitudinal or electromagnetic probe. Therefore, the ab initio Density Function Theory is used to demonstrate that the chemical doping of the graphene by the alkali or alkaline earth atoms dramatically changes the poor graphene excitation spectrum in the ultra-violet frequency range (4 - 10 eV). Four prominent modes are detected. Two of them are the intra-layer plasmons with the square-root dispersion, characteristic for the two-dimensional modes. The remaining two are the inter-layer plasmons, very strong in the long-wavelength limit but damped for larger wave-vectors. The optical absorption calculations show that the inter-layer plasmons are both optically active, which makes these materials suitable for small organic molecule sensing. This is particularly intriguing because the optically active two-dimensional plasmons have not been detected in other materials.