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Updated: Jul 12, 2025

Recombination Dynamics in Thin-film Photovoltaic Materials via Time-resolved Microwave Conductivity
Published on: March 6, 2017
Determining hot-carrier transport dynamics from terahertz emission
Mohammad Taghinejad1,2, Chenyi Xia2, Martin Hrton3,4
1Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Abstract:
Understanding the ultrafast excitation and transport dynamics of plasmon-driven hot carriers is critical to the development of optoelectronics, photochemistry, and solar-energy harvesting. However, the ultrashort time and length scales associated with the behavior of these highly out-of-equilibrium carriers have impaired experimental verification of ab initio quantum theories. Here, we present an approach to studying plasmonic hot-carrier dynamics that analyzes the temporal waveform of coherent terahertz bursts radiated by photo-ejected hot carriers from designer nano-antennas with a broken symmetry. For ballistic carriers ejected from gold antennas, we find an ~11-femtosecond timescale composed of the plasmon lifetime and ballistic transport time. Polarization- and phase-sensitive detection of terahertz fields further grant direct access to their ballistic transport trajectory. Our approach opens explorations of ultrafast carrier dynamics in optically excited nanostructures.
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