No Arabic abstract
Nanowires (NWs) with their quasi-one-dimensionality often present different structural and opto-electronic properties than their thin-film counterparts. The thinner they are the larger these differences are, in particular in the carrier-phonon scattering and thermal conductivity. In this work, we present femtosecond transient absorbance measurements on GaAs0.8P0.2 NWs of two different diameters, 36 and 51 nm. The results show that thinner NWs sustain the hot-carriers at a higher temperature for longer times than thicker NWs. We explain the observation suggesting that in thinner NWs, the build-up of a hot-phonon bottleneck is easier than in thicker NWs because of the increased phonon scattering at the NW sidewalls which facilitates the build-up of a large phonon density. The large number of optical phonons emitted during the carrier relaxation processes generate a non-equilibrium population of acoustic phonons that propagates less efficiently in thin NWs. This makes the possible acoustic-to-optical phonon up-conversion process easier, which prolongs the LO phonon lifetime resulting in the slowdown of the carrier cooling. The important observation that the carrier temperature in thin NWs is higher than in thick NWs already at the beginning of the hot carrier regime suggests that the phonon-mediated scattering processes in the non-thermal regime play a major role at least for the carrier densities investigated here (8x1018-4x1019 cm-3). Our results also suggest that the boundary scattering of phonons at crystal defects is negligible compared to the surface scattering at the NW sidewalls.
The diffusion of electron-hole pairs, which are excited in an intrinsic graphene by the ultrashort focused laser pulse in mid-IR or visible spectral region, is described for the cases of peak-like or spread over the passive region distributions of carriers. The spatio-temporal transient optical response on a high-frequency probe beam appears to be strongly dependent on the regime of diffusion and can be used for verification of the elasic relaxation mechanism. Sign flip of the differential transmission coefficient takes place due to interplay of the carrier-induced contribution and weak dynamic conductivity of undoped graphene.
We report measurements of electronic, thermoelectric, and galvanomagnetic properties of individual single crystal antimony telluride (Sb2Te3) nanowires with diameters in the range of 20-100 nm. Temperature dependent resistivity and thermoelectric power (TEP) measurements indicate hole dominant diffusive thermoelectric generation, with an enhancement of the TEP for smaller diameter wires up to 110 uV/K at T = 300 K. We measure the magnetoresistance, in magnetic fields both parallel and perpendicular to the nanowire [110] axis, where strong anisotropic positive magnetoresistance behavior was observed.
The broadband and ultrafast photoresponse of graphene has been extensively studied in recent years, although the photoexcited carrier dynamics is still far from being completely understood. Different experimental approaches imply either one of two fundamentally different scattering mechanisms for hot electrons. One is high-energy optical phonons, while the other is disorder-driven supercollisions with acoustic phonons. However, the concurrent relaxation via both optical and acoustic phonons has not been considered so far, hindering the interpretation of different experiments within a unified framework. Here we expand the optical phonon-mediated cooling model, to include electron scattering with the acoustic phonons. By assuming the enhancement of electron-acoustic phonon supercollisions from the localized defect at the photothermoelectric current-generating interface, we provide a broader perspective to the ultrafast photoresponse of graphene, highlighting the previously overlooked effect of the interface for cooling dynamics. We show that the transient photothermoelectric response, which has been attributed exclusively to supercollisions, can be successfully explained without rejecting the established optical phonon relaxation pathway, demonstrating that the two cooling mechanisms are not mutually exclusive but complement each other.
We present a numerical study on the intraband optical conductivity of hot carriers at quasi-equilibria in photoexcited graphene based on the semiclassical Boltzmann transport equations (BTE) with the aim of understanding the effects of intrinsic optical phonon and extrinsic coulomb scattering caused by charged impurities at the graphene--substrate interface. Instead of using full-BTE solutions, we employ iterative solutions of the BTE and the comprehensive model for the temporal evolutions of hot-carrier temperature and hot-optical-phonon occupations to reduce computational costs. Undoped graphene exhibits large positive photoconductivity owing to the increase in thermally excited carriers and the reduction in charged impurity scattering. The frequency dependencies of the photoconductivity in undoped graphene having high concentrations of charged impurities significantly deviate from those observed in the simple Drude model, which can be attributed to temporally varying charged impurity scattering during terahertz (THz) probing in the hot-carrier cooling process. Heavily doped graphene exhibits small negative photoconductivity similar to that of the Drude model. In this case, charged impurity scattering is substantially suppressed by the carrier-screening effect, and the temperature dependencies of the Drude weight and optical phonon scattering governs the negative photoconductivity. In lightly doped graphene, the appearance of negative and positive photoconductivity depends on the frequency and the crossover from negative photoconductivity to positive emerges from increasing the charged impurity concentration. This indicates the change of the dominant scattering mechanism from optical phonons to charged impurities. Our approach provides a quantitative understanding of non-Drude behaviors and the temporal evolution of photoconductivity in graphene.
Van der Waals semiconductor heterostructures could be a platform to harness hot photoexcited carriers in the next generation of optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices. The internal quantum efficiency of hot-carrier devices is determined by the relation between photocarrier extraction and thermalization rates. Using textit{ab-initio} methods we show that the photocarrier thermalization time in single-layer transition metal dichalcogenides strongly depends on the peculiarities of the phonon spectrum and the electronic spin-orbit coupling. In detail, the lifted spin degeneracy in the valence band suppresses the hole scattering on acoustic phonons, slowing down the thermalization of holes by one order of magnitude as compared to electrons. Moreover, the hole thermalization time behaves differently in MoS$_2$ and WSe$_2$ because spin-orbit interactions differ in these seemingly similar materials. We predict that the internal quantum efficiency of a tunneling van der Waals semiconductor heterostructure depends qualitatively on whether MoS$_2$ or WSe$_2$ is used.