Ultrasensitive Optical Probing of Plasmonic Hot Electron Occupancies

The strong localization of plasmon-assisted photon absorption facilitates the emergence of so-called hot electrons with energy levels deviating from Fermi-Dirac distribution. We demonstrated that spectroscopic ellipsometry is capable of grabbing the in-depth distribution and the temporal evolution of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mediated hot electron populations [1].