Ultrafast Interband Transition in Gold Probed by a Femtosecond Plasmonic Wavepacket

The illumination of gold with ultrashort pulses produces interband transitions and leads to hot excited electrons in the conduction band, which can take part in plasmonic oscillations [1], [2]. Based on this phenomenon, we have investigated ultrafast hot electron dynamics in a pump-probe experiment where the probe pulse was a femtosecond plasmonic wavepacket propagating on a gold film.