Ultrafast high THz-field photo-driven carrier dynamics and transport
in nanostructures
Christos Flytzanis
Laboratoire Pierre Aigrain, Ecole Normale Superieure, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
The electronics and optoelectronics technology is increasingly dominated by nanometer
scale structures. This trend is going to continue in the future driven to large extent by the
perceived needs of future computing technology for higher speed, smaller footprint and
drastically improved efficiency, where logical state switching should be achieved with
drastically reduced energy-per-bit cost. This entails operating nanometer scale solid state
structures at high electric field strengths and in THz frequency range or on subpicosecond time-scale.
The material properties and excitations undergo profound modifications in such spatiotemporal scales as are the dynamics of the elementary scattering process and this has a
drastic impact on the charge carrier dynamics and transport in such nanostructures
through the friction they set in at the very microscopic quantum level.
The talk will summarize the status of research in this field by outlining the main regimes
of carrier dynamics and transport on ultra-short temporal scales pertinent for
nanostructured semiconductors and ferroelectrics in terms of simple quantum –kinetic
scattering processes and induced carrier-carrier interactions and briefly discuss the issue
of the quantum friction in media lacking spatial inversion symmetry.
State of the art experimental studies employing optical-THz pump-probe time resolved
spectroscopy illustrating pertinent charge carrier dynamics and transport in
semiconductor and ferroelectric nanostructures will be presented.