Graphene as optical and UV mirrors

Question

One usually hears about graphene as a good thermal conductor, and good light absorber due to its tunable bandgap properties. But i haven't heard about its aplicability as an optical mirror. In fact, mostly the opposite is true: the optical transmissivity of monolayer graphene is very high ($\approx$ 98%)

Since there are material engineering tricks to tune the separation between two or more graphene layers, i would expect that multi-layer destructive interference can be achieved with optical wavelengths, enhancing reflectivity

I know that probably graphene is not the best material to do this, but allow me to insist. Why? Well, graphene mantains it's properties well over 3000K, and a couple of layers of it can be quite strong and very light. All these properties make it the ideal material for a laser-pushed sail.

By the way, i'm asking about optical and UV frequencies, i know that monolayer graphene is reflective on the microwave region, and i'm not asking about that. Thanks

Answer 1

There has been some research in the use of graphene in optics, such as from Berkeley's Ultrafast Nano Optics Group and this article about the use of graphene in digitl communications.

In terms of graphene's UV and visual reflective properties, according to the University of Manchester and "High optical absorbance of graphene", it is graphene's absorbance properties that quite unique - with a one atom sheet having 2.3% absorbance in the visual range. For both the visual and UV range, this OptisInfobase article go into far more detail (with data).