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Abstract
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Based on the effective Schrödinger–Poisson model a new physical mechanism for resonant hotelectron
generation at irradiated half-space metal–vacuum interface of electron gas with arbitrary
degree of degeneracy is proposed. The energy dispersion of undamped plasmons in the coupled
Hermitian Schrödinger–Poisson system reveals an exceptional point coinciding the minimum energy
of plasmon conduction band. Existence of such exceptional behavior is a well-know character of
damped oscillation which in this case refers to resonant wave–particle interactions analogous to the
collisionless Landau damping effect. The damped Schrödinger–Poisson system is used to model the
collective electron tunneling into the vacuum. The damped plasmon energy dispersion is shown to
have a full-featured exceptional point structure with variety of interesting technological applications.
In the band gap of the damped collective excitation,depending on the tunneling parameter value,
there is a resonant energy orbital for which the wave-like growing of collective excitations cancels the
damping of the single electron tunneling wavefunction. This important feature is solely due to dualtone
wave-particle oscillations, characteristics of the collective excitations in the quantum electron
system leading to a resonant photo-plasmonic effect, as a collective analog of the well-known photoelectric
effect. The few nanometer wavelengths high-energy collective photo-electrons emanating
from the metallic surfaces can lead to a much higher efficiency of plasmonic solar cell devices, as
compared to their semiconductor counterpart of electron–hole excitations at the Fermi energy level.
The photo-plasmonic effect may also be used to study the quantum electron tunneling and electron
spill-out at metallic surfaces. Current findings may help to design more efficient spasers by using the
feature-rich plasmonic exceptional point structure.
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