Electron-phonon coupling and transient dynamics of hot carriers: from interpretation of photoemission experiments to transport simulations in devices

Overview & Synopsis

The progress in DFT-based description of the electron-phonon scattering allowed to describe the relaxation dynamics of hot or photoexcited electrons in several materials, in very good agreement with time-resolved spectroscopy experiments. As hot carriers also start to attract attention in the context of emerging concepts for energy conversion, here we present our first results related to the coupling of ab initio data with device-oriented Monte Carlo simulation methods. We show that DFT-based description of the electron-phonon intervalley scattering in GaAs, coupled with the stochastic Monte Carlo method, allows to describe the energy transfer from electrons to phonons in transient regime, in good agreement with previous time-resolved photoemission experiments.