Efficiently utilizing the hot carriers – electrons and holes whose energy distribution deviates significantly from the equilibrium distribution, is the key to a broad range of emerging applications, for example, photovoltaics and photocatalysis. Even though the exploitation of hot carriers from nanoscale systems has tremendous potential, optimizing and realizing nanostructures tailored for the above-mentioned applications continues to be challenging. The primary rationale behind this roadblock is the inability to directly investigate hot carriers at their intrinsic spatial length (~ Angstrom), time (~ femtoseconds) and energy (~ electron volts) scales, due to the difficulty in achieving all the three resolutions simultaneously in state-of-the-art experiments. By developing broadband nonlinear spectroscopy at the atomic space-time resolutions, researchers from Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI-FKF) and Politecnico di Milano have now succeeded in capturing the dynamics of hot carriers in a single molecule.
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