No Arabic abstract
A non--equilibrium occupation distribution relaxes towards the Fermi--Dirac distribution due to electron--electron scattering even in finite Fermi systems. The dynamic evolution of this thermalization process assumed to result from an optical excitation is investigated numerically by solving a Boltzmann equation for the carrier populations using a one--dimensional disordered system. We focus on the short time--scale behavior. The logarithmically long time--scale associated with the glassy behavior of interacting electrons in disordered systems is not treated in our investigation. For weak disorder and short range interaction we recover the expected result that disorder enhances the relaxation rate as compared to the case without disorder. For sufficiently strong disorder, however, we find an opposite trend due to the reduction of scattering probabilities originating from the strong localization of the single--particle states. Long--range interaction in this regime produces a similar effect. The relaxation rate is found to scale with the interaction strength, however, the interplay between the implicit and the explicit character of the interaction produces an anomalous exponent.
We present a detailed experimental and theoretical analysis of the spin dynamics of two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) in a series of n-doped GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells. Picosecond-resolution polarized pump-probe reflection techniques were applied in order to study in detail the temperature-, concentration- and quantum-well-width- dependencies of the spin relaxation rate of a small photoexcited electron population. A rapid enhancement of the spin life-time with temperature up to a maximum near the Fermi temperature of the 2DEG was demonstrated experimentally. These observations are consistent with the Dyakonov-Perel spin relaxation mechanism controlled by electron-electron collisions. The experimental results and theoretical predictions for the spin relaxation times are in good quantitative agreement.
We report on the effect of elastic intervalley scattering on the energy transport between electrons and phonons in many-valley semiconductors. We derive a general expression for the electron-phonon energy flow rate at the limit where elastic intervalley scattering dominates over diffusion. Electron heating experiments on heavily doped n-type Si samples with electron concentration in the range $3.5-16.0times 10^{25}$ m$^{-3}$ are performed at sub-1 K temperatures. We find a good agreement between the theory and the experiment.
The Raman response of the metallic glass Ni$_{67}$Zr$_{33}$ is measured as a function of polarization and temperature and analyzed theoretically. Unexpectedly, the intensity in the range up to 300wn increases upon cooling, which is counterintuitive when the response originates from vibrations alone as in insulators. The increase finds a natural explanation if the conduction electrons are assumed to scatter on localized vibrations with a scattering probability proportional to the Debye-Waller factor. None of our assumptions is material specific, and the results are expected to be relevant for disordered systems in general.
We use femtosecond optical spectroscopy to systematically measure the primary energy relaxation rate k1 of photoexcited carriers in cuprate and pnictide superconductors. We find that k1 increases monotonically with increased negative strain in the crystallographic a-axis. Generally, the Bardeen-Shockley deformation potential theorem and, specifically, pressure-induced Raman shifts reported in the literature suggest that increased negative strain enhances electron-phonon coupling, which implies that the observed direct correspondence between a and k1 is consistent with the canonical assignment of k1 to the electron-phonon interaction. The well-known non-monotonic dependence of the superconducting critical temperature Tc on the a-axis strain is also reflected in a systematic dependence Tc on k1, with a distinct maximum at intermediate values (~16 ps-1 at room temperature). The empirical non-monotonic systematic variation of Tc with the strength of the electron-phonon interaction provides us with unique insight into the role of electron-phonon interaction in relation to the mechanism of high-Tc superconductivity as a crossover phenomenon.
Mean-field theory of non-interacting disordered electron systems is widely and successfully used to describe equilibrium properties of alloys in the whole range of disorder strengths. It, however, fails to take into account effects of quantum coherence and localizing back-scattering effects when applied to transport phenomena. We present an approximate scheme extending the mean-field theory for one-electron properties in that it offers a formula for the two-particle vertex and the electrical conductivity non-perturbatively including the leading-order vertex corrections in a way that the approximation remains consistent and the conductivity non-negative in all disorder regimes.