Photo-plasmonic effect as the hot electron generation mechanism

Based on the effective Schrödinger-Poisson model a new physical mechanism for resonant hot-electron generation at irradiated half-space metal-vacuum interface of electron gas with arbitrary degree of degeneracy is proposed. The energy dispersion of undamped plasmons in the coupled Hermitian Schrödinger-Poisson system reveals an exceptional point coinciding the minimum energy of plasmon conduction band. Existence of such exceptional behavior is a well-know character of damped oscillation which in this case refers to resonant wave-particle interactions analogous to the collisionless Landau damping effect. The damped Schrödinger-Poisson system is used to model the collective electron tunneling into the vacuum. The damped plasmon energy dispersion is shown to have a full-featured exceptional point structure with variety of interesting technological applications. In the band gap of the damped collective excitation,depending on the tunneling parameter value, there is a resonant energy orbital for which the wave-like growing of collective excitations cancels the damping of the single electron tunneling wavefunction. This important feature is solely due to dual-tone wave-particle oscillations, characteristics of the collective excitations in the quantum electron system leading to a resonant photo-plasmonic effect, as a collective analog of the well-known photo-electric effect. The few nanometer wavelengths high-energy collective photo-electrons emanating from the metallic surfaces can lead to a much higher efficiency of plasmonic solar cell devices, as compared to their semiconductor counterpart of electron-hole excitations at the Fermi energy level. The photo-plasmonic effect may also be used to study the quantum electron tunneling and electron spill-out at metallic surfaces. Current findings may help to design more efficient spasers by using the feature-rich plasmonic exceptional point structure.