Reducing hot-carrier relaxation rates is of great significance in overcoming energy loss that fundamentally limits the efficiency of solar energy utilization. Semiconductor quantum dots are expected to have much slower carrier cooling because the spacing between their discrete electronic levels is much larger than phonon energy. However, the slower carrier cooling is difficult to observe due to...

Surface plasmons provide a pathway to efficiently absorb and confine light in metallic nanostructures, thereby bridging photonics to the nano scale. The decay of surface plasmons generates energetic ‘hot’ carriers, which can drive chemical reactions or be injected into semiconductors for nano-scale photochemical or photovoltaic energy conversion. Novel plasmonic hot carrier devices and architec...

Decay of surface plasmons to hot carriers finds a wide variety of applications in energy conversion, photocatalysis and photodetection. However, a detailed theoretical description of plasmonic hot-carrier generation in real materials has remained incomplete. Here we report predictions for the prompt distributions of excited 'hot' electrons and holes generated by plasmon decay, before inelastic ...

A typical signature of charge extraction in disordered organic systems is dispersive transport, which implies a distribution of charge carrier mobilities that negatively impact on device performance. Dispersive transport has been commonly understood to originate from a time-dependent mobility of hot charge carriers that reduces as excess energy is lost during relaxation in the density of states...

The use of surface plasmons, charge density oscillations of conduction electrons of metallic nanostructures, to boost the efficiency of light-harvesting devices through increased light-matter interactions could drastically alter how sunlight is converted into electricity or fuels. These excitations can decay directly into energetic electron-hole pairs, useful for photocurrent generation or phot...

Hot-carrier reliability is studied in core logic PMOSFETs with a thin gate-oxide (Tox 1⁄4 2 nm) and in Input/Output PMOSFETs with a thick gate-oxide (6.5 nm) used for systems on chip applications. Hot-hole (HH) injections are found to play a more important role in the injection mechanisms and in the degradation efficiency. This depends on the technology node for stressing voltage conditions cor...

Metal-halide perovskites are at the frontier of optoelectronic research due to solution processability and excellent semiconductor properties. Here we use transient absorption spectroscopy to study hot-carrier distributions in CH3NH3PbI3 and quantify key semiconductor parameters. Above bandgap, non-resonant excitation creates quasi-thermalized carrier distributions within 100 fs. During carrier...

Flow of photocurrent through the metal-oxide-semiconductor structure induced by pulsed infrared CO2 laser is investigated experimentally. In case a perfect insulator, has photocapacitive character. Its rise based on hot carrier phenomenon; no generation present, only redistribution laser-heated carriers takes place at semiconductor surface. The magnitude this displacement current related to cap...