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We report the direct observation of the thermalization of electrons in gold following 180 fs optical pulse excitation. The evolution of the electron energy distribution from the nascent (as photoexcited) to a hot Fermi-Dirac distribution was measured by time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Depending on the excitation density, thermalization times as long as 1 ps were observed. A model incorporating both electron-electron and electron-phonon scattering, and using Fermi-liquid theory to properly account for screening is found to reproduce the main features of the experiment.
Fann et al. (Sun,) studied this question.