Aspect Ratio Controls Hot-Carrier Generation in Gold Nanobricks

Energetic or “hot” electrons and holes generated from the decay of localized surface plasmons in metallic nanoparticles have great potential for applications in photocatalysis, photovoltaics, and sensing. Here, we study the generation of hot carriers in brick-shaped gold nanoparticles using a recently developed modeling approach that combines a solution to Maxwell’s equation with large-scale tight-binding simulations to evaluate Fermi’s Golden Rule. We find that hot-carrier generation depends sensitively on the aspect ratio of the nanobricks with flatter bricks, producing a large number of energetic electrons irrespective of the light polarization. In contrast, the hot-carrier generation rates of elongated nanobricks exhibit a strong dependence on the light polarization. The insights resulting from our calculations can be harnessed to design nanobricks that produce hot carriers with properties tailored to specific device applications.