Generation of plasmonic hot carriers from d-bands in metallic nanoparticles

Abstract

We present an approach to master the well-known challenge of calculating the contribution of d-bands to plasmon-induced hot carrier rates in metallic nanoparticles. We generalise the widely used spherical well model for the nanoparticle wavefunctions to flat d-bands using the envelope function technique. Using Fermi's golden rule, we calculate the generation rates of hot carriers after the decay of the plasmon due to transitions from either a d-band state to an sp-band state or from an sp-band state to another sp-band state. We apply this formalism to spherical silver nanoparticles with radii up to 20~nm and also study the dependence of hot carrier rates on the energy of the d-bands. We find that for nanoparticles with a radius less than 2.5~nm sp-band state to sp-band state transitions dominate hot carrier production while d-band state to sp-band state transitions give the largest contribution for larger nanoparticles.

References in corpus (3)

• Localized surface plasmon resonance in silver nanoparticles: Atomistic first-principles time-dependent density-functional theory calculations
• Lifetime of the first and second collective excitations in metallic nanoparticles
• Generating hot carriers in plasmonic nanoparticles: when quantization does and does not matter?

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Hot-Carrier Generation in Plasmonic Nanoparticles: The Importance of Atomic Structure
• Plasmon-induced hot carriers from interband and intraband transitions in large noble metal nanoparticles
• Tailoring hot-carrier distributions of plasmonic nanostructures through surface alloying
• Theory of hot-carrier generation in bimetallic plasmonic catalysts
• Dynamical evolution of the Schottky barrier as a determinant contribution to electron-hole pair stabilization and photocatalysis of plasmon-induced hot carriers