Author ORCID Identifier

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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8246-1422

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Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

College/Unit

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department/Program/Center

Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

Hot electrons established by the absorption of high-energy photons typically thermalize on a picosecond time scale in a semiconductor, dissipating energy via various phonon-mediated relaxation pathways. Here it is shown that a strong hot carrier distribution can be produced using a type-II quantum well structure. In such systems it is shown that the dominant hot carrier thermalization process is limited by the radiative recombination lifetime of electrons with reduced wavefunction overlap with holes. It is proposed that the subsequent reabsorption of acoustic and optical phonons is facilitated by a mismatch in phonon dispersions at the InAs-AlAsSb interface and serves to further stabilize hot electrons in this system. This lengthens the time scale for thermalization to nanoseconds and results in a hot electron distribution with a temperature of 490 K for a quantum well structure under steady-state illumination at room temperature.

Source Citation

Esmaielpour, H., Whiteside, V. R., Piyathilaka, H. P., Vijeyaragunathan, S., Wang, B., Adcock-Smith, E., Roberts, K. P., Mishima, T. D., Santos, M. B., Bristow, A. D., & Sellers, I. R. (2018). Enhanced hot electron lifetimes in quantum wells with inhibited phonon coupling. Scientific Reports, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30894-9

Comments

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Cre- ative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not per- mitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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