Ballistic vs. diffusive transport in metals

Abstract

Using the Boltzmann transport model, we show that, somewhat unintuitively, ballistic transport of electrons in metals is weaker than diffusive transport. This happens because the femtosecond-scale collision rates of the non-thermal electrons makes their mean-free path negligible. Our predictions are correlated with various photoluminescence and nonlinear optics experimental examples both for Continuous Wave (CW) and pulsed illumination, and open the way to easy modelling of the non-thermal electron distributions in metal nanostructures of arbitrary complexity.