Femtosecond Circular Photon Drag Effect in the Ag/Pd Nanocomposite

Gennady M Mikheev,Konstantin G Mikheev,Aleksandr S Saushin,Viatcheslav V Vanyukov,Yuri P Svirko

doi:10.1186/s11671-016-1771-4

Gennady M Mikheev, Konstantin G Mikheev + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s11671-016-1771-4

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Abstract

We report on the observation of the helicity-dependent photoresponse of the 20-μm-thick silver–palladium (Ag/Pd) nanocomposite films. In the experiment, 120 fs pulses of Ti:S laser induced in the film an electric current perpendicular to the incidence plane. The photoinduced current is a linear function of the incident beam power, and its sign depends on the beam polarization and angle of incidence. In particular, the current is zero for the p- and s-polarized beams, while its sign is opposite for the right- and left-circularly polarized beams. By comparing experimental results with theoretical analysis, we show that the photoresponse of the Ag/Pd nanocomposite originates from the photon drag effect.

Highlights

Growing interest to the engineering of the surface or bulk spin-polarized photoinduced currents [1] has attracted attention to the circular photogalvanic (CPGE) [2] and circular photon drag (CPDE) effects [3]
We report on the excitation of the helicitydependent photoinduced voltage (PIV) in a 20-μm-thick Ag/Pd nanocomposite film under irradiation with the femtosecond laser pulses at an oblique incidence
A femtosecond laser pulse produces an electric current in the film that manifests itself as a unipolar nanosecond PIV pulse between electrodes A and B that has an opposite polarity for the left- and right-circularly polarized incident beams

Summary

Introduction

Growing interest to the engineering of the surface or bulk spin-polarized photoinduced currents [1] has attracted attention to the circular photogalvanic (CPGE) [2] and circular photon drag (CPDE) effects [3]. These phenomena, which manifest themselves as conversion of the photon angular momenta to momentum of charge carrier, were extensively studied in two-dimensional (2D) [1, 4,5,6,7,8,9] and planar [10,11,12,13,14] materials during the last decade. To the best of our knowledge kinetics of the helicity-dependent photoinduced surface currents injected by a single femtosecond laser pulse in metallic nanocomposite has not been studied yet

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