Real time relaxation dynamics of macroscopically photo-excited electrons toward the Fermi degeneracy formation in the conduction band of semiconductors

TL;DR

This paper models the ultrafast relaxation process of photo-excited electrons in semiconductors, revealing rapid initial relaxation followed by a slow, inverse-time relaxation towards Fermi degeneracy, consistent with recent experiments.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of electron relaxation dynamics post-photo-excitation, highlighting the slow approach to Fermi degeneracy and matching experimental observations.

Findings

Rapid multi-phonon relaxation immediately after excitation

Multi-peaked energy distribution of electrons over the conduction band

Fermi degeneracy formation takes an infinite time due to slow acoustic phonon emission

Abstract

Concerning with the recent experiment of time-resolved two-photon photo-emission spectral measurements on semiconductors (GaAs, InP), we theoretically study real time relaxation dynamics of macroscopically photo-excited electrons, toward the Fermi degeneracy formation in an originally vacant conduction band of these semiconductors. Very soon after the photo-excitation, the whole electrons are shown to exhibit a quite rapid relaxation, like an avalanching phenomenon, mainly due to successive multi-(optical and acoustic) phonon emission from them. Repeating this multi-phonon process, the whole energy distribution of the electrons is shown to become a multi-peaked structure largely elongated over the lower part of the wide conduction band. However, after around 1 ps from the excitation, this relaxation critically slows down, since the emission of a long-wave acoustic phonon from electrons around the Fermi level becomes prohibitively difficult. By using the electron temperature approximation, we show that this slow relaxation is inversely proportional to time. Thus, the formation of the complete Fermi degeneracy takes an infinite time. These theoretical results are quite consistent to the aforementioned recent experiment.