  Coupling of plasmons in graphene at terahert (THz) frequencies with surface
plasmons in a heavily-doped substrate is studied theoretically. We reveal that
a huge scattering rate may completely damp out the plasmons, so that proper
choices of material and geometrical parameters are essential to suppress the
coupling effect and to obtain the minimum damping rate in graphene. Even with
the doping concentration 10^{19} - 10^{20} cm^{-3} and the thickness of the
dielectric layer between graphene and the substrate 100 nm, which are typical
values in real graphene samples with a heavily-doped substrate, the increase in
the damping rate is not negligible in comparison with the
acoustic-phonon-limited damping rate. Dependence of the damping rate on
wavenumber, thicknesses of graphene-to-substrate and gate-to-graphene
separation, substrate doping concentration, and dielectric constants of
surrounding materials are investigated. It is shown that the damping rate can
be much reduced by the gate screening, which suppresses the field spread of the
graphene plasmons into the substrate.
