Ultrafast Surface Plasmon Probing of Interband and Intraband Hot Electron Excitations.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38833525.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.4c01669 and PMC identifier 11229057.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Upon the interaction of light with metals, nonthermal electrons are generated with intriguing transient behavior. Here, we present femtosecond hot electron probing in a noveloptical pump/plasmon probe scheme. With this, we probed ultrafast interband and intraband dynamics with 15 nm interface selectivity, observing a two-component-decay of hot electron populations. Results are in good agreement with a three-temperature model of the metal; thus, we could attribute the fast (∼100 fs) decay to the thermalization of hot electrons and the slow (picosecond) decay to electron-lattice thermalization. Moreover, we could modulate the transmission of our plasmonic channel with ∼40% depth, hinting at the possibility of ultrafast information processing applications with plasmonic signals.