Ballistic photocurrent driven by optical phonon modes in a polaronic ferroelectric

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how local electron-phonon interactions in ferroelectric materials can significantly enhance nonlinear photocurrent through phonon-assisted ballistic currents, offering a new approach to improve bulk photovoltaic effects.

Contribution

It reveals the role of phonon-assisted ballistic currents in boosting photocurrent in ferroelectrics with strong electron-phonon coupling, using real-time simulations.

Findings

Ballistic current is enhanced under linearly polarized light.

Phonon modes generate asymmetric carrier distributions.

Ballistic current increases several times above band-gap excitation.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of local electron-phonon coupling on nonlinear optical conductivity in an interacting ferroelectric system. Using real-time simulations, we show an enhancement in nonlinear conductivity under linearly-polarized light due to generation of the phonon-assisted ballistic-current in addition to the injection-current generated by electron-hole pairs. The optically excited phonon modes generate an asymmetric carrier distribution that causes a strong directional ballistic-current. The ballistic-current enhances the photocurrent several times at above band-gap excitation frequencies and is sublinearly dependent on the excitation intensity. This strong phonon-assisted zero-frequency directional ballistic-current demonstrates an alternative way to boost the bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE) in electronic ferroelectric materials with strong local electron-phonon coupling.