Tuning resonance energy transfer with magneto-optical properties of graphene

Resonance energy transfer (RET) is an important mechanism throught which an excited quantum emitter may transfer its energy to a neighboring one in the ground state. Amid the several situations where RET plays a relevant role, a remarkable one is the light harvesting process in plants, in which chlorophyll molecules excite themselves by absorbing light and efficiently transfer this excitation energy to their neighboring molecules. An efficient energy transfer allows a variety of applications, such as photovoltaics, luminescence, sensing, and many others. Due to this numerous applications, controlled modification of the RET rate has become a topic of great interest. In this work we take advantage of graphene's magneto-optical response and investigate the RET between two emitters placed in the vicinity of a suspended graphene monolayer in vacuum, submitted to a perpendicular external magnetic field. We show that the RET rate may change dramatically with respect to the result in free space even for small modulations of the magnetic field and this effect may be obtained even for somewhat modest values of the field.