Energy relaxation of an electron-hole plasma in semiconductors

Abstract

We calculate the energy relaxation of an electron-hole plasma created by a short laser pulse in semiconductors like Si and GaAs in two cases: (i) when the carrier-carrier collision time is much shorter than the carrier-phonon one, so that a carrier temperature T c exists. We give the variation of T c with time; (ii) when there is no carrier temperature and the initial energy distribution is a peaked function of width Δ. We give the time evolution of the system when Δ is much larger and much smaller than the phonon energy.