- Research
Hot-Carrier Generation from Plasmon Decay in Energy Conversion
Scientific Achievement
First theoretical study combining
Significance & impact
Understanding the initial energy distribution of
The images in Sundararaman, R., Narang, P., Jermyn, A. S., Goddard, W. A. & Atwater, H. A. Theoretical predictions for hot-carrier generation from surface plasmon decay. Nature Communications 5, 8, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6788 (2014) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Top: Plasmonic hot-carrier generation and injection; bottom left: band structure and allowed transitions for copper; bottom right: energy distribution of hot electrons and holes.
Research Details
- Relativistic DFT+U
ab initiocalculation of band structures is in excellent agreement withphotoemission experiments. - Hot-carrier distribution is sensitive to the electronic band structure of the
plasmonic metal. Generated-carrier distribution also depends on the electromagnetic modes excited in theplasmonic structure.
Contact: haa@caltech.edu