Development of a new analytical solution for electronic heat capacity for higher electron temperatures

Abstract

A new analytical solution has been found for the electronic heat capacity of typical s-band metals. It is valid for high electron temperatures of the order of tens of kK, commonly reached in fs pulsed laser ablation. We have used the density of states (DOS) from the free-electron gas model (FEG) and a special type of function called polylogarithms. From the exact analytical solution, a third order Taylor expansion which works well up to 50kK could be derived. A new term was added to the DOS for d-band metals, which allowed us to find a new semi-analytical solution which predicts accurately the electronic heat capacity of Cu.