Plasmonic Hot-Electron & Photothermal Simulator

When light hits a metal nanoparticle near its plasmon resonance, the absorbed energy splits down two very different paths. Some of it re-radiates immediately as scattered light — useless for anything but making the particle visible. The rest dephases nonradiatively into a population of energetic "hot" electrons sitting above the Fermi level, which then relax by dumping their energy into lattice vibrations, heating the particle and, through it, the surrounding medium. This simulator drives a gold nanosphere with a tunable laser and shows both channels live: an absorption curve that peaks at resonance, a radiative/nonradiative split that shifts with particle size, a hot-electron energy histogram that repopulates every frame, and a temperature field that visibly grows around the particle as nonradiative power accumulates. Adjust wavelength, radius and intensity to see how each parameter trades scattering brightness against heating and hot-carrier yield.