Fast light which demonstrates negative group velocity, is achieved by the anomalous dispersion or photon tunneling. However, many applications based on the fast light are limited due to the disadvantages of inferior tunability or nonlinear dispersion relationship of the fast light-carrying medium. In this paper, we propose the graphene plasmonic crystal waveguides whose guiding and claddings are composed of the graphene plasmonic metamaterials, where the backward propagating plasmonic modes

more »

... esponding to negative group velocity are observed. The dispersion relation and the group velocity of three types of graphene plasmonic crystal waveguides are investigated by varying the materials and the geometrical parameters of the graphene plasmonic crystal waveguides. Numerical experiments are designed to verify the authenticity of a fast plasmon in the graphene plasmonic crystal waveguides. Our proposed graphene plasmonic crystal waveguides might find significant applications in the fields of nanophotonics, on-chip electromagnetic field manipulation in deep nanoscale, and the technique of high density plasmonic integrated plasmonic circuit in the future. INDEX TERMS Plasmonic waveguides, metamaterials, negative group velocity, anomalous dispersion, graphene plasmonic crystals. 142250 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ VOLUME 8, 2020