2018/10/01 by Yonatan Dubi, Dubi, Yonatan, Yonatan Sivan +1 · 3 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Gold and Silver Nanoparticles Synthesis and Applications #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Optics (physics.optics) #nanoparticles nucleation surface interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.00565
openalex publication_date 2018/10/01 · openalex created_date 2022/08/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Understanding the interplay between illumination and the electron\ndistribution in metallic nanostructures is a crucial step towards developing\napplications such as plasmonic photo-catalysis for green fuels, nano-scale\nphoto-detection and more. Elucidating this interplay is challenging, as it\nrequires taking into account all channels of energy flow in the electronic\nsystem. Here, we develop such a theory, which is based on a coupled\nBoltzmann-heat equations and requires only energy conservation and basic\nthermodynamics, where the electron distribution, and the electron and phonon\n(lattice) temperatures are determined em uniquely. Applying this theory to\nrealistic illuminated nanoparticle systems, we find that the electron and\nphonon temperatures are similar, thus justifying the (classical) single\ntemperature models. We show that while the fraction of high-energy ``hot''\ncarriers compared to thermalized carriers grows substantially with illumination\nintensity, it remains extremely small (on the order of 10-8). Importantly,\nmost of the absorbed illumination power goes into heating rather than\ngenerating hot carriers, thus rendering plasmonic hot carrier generation\nextremely inefficient. Our formulation allows for the first time a unique\nquantitative comparison of theory and measurements of steady-state electron\ndistributions in metallic nanostructures.\n