Yonatan Sivan

We show that a failure to account for the thermo-optic nonlinear response of the metals leads to significant overestimates of the temperature developing in illuminated metal-dielectric composites used for photocatalysis. This error is then frequently interpreted incorrectly as nonthermal (i.e., “hot”) electrons action. As an alternative, we provide a purely thermal self-consistent model that explains the observed experimental data.