Ab initio electronic relaxation times and transport in noble metals

Abstract

Relaxation times employed to study electron transport in metals are typically taken to be constants and obtained empirically. Here, we use fully ab initio calculations to compute the electron-phonon relaxation times of Cu, Ag, and Au and find that they vary significantly on the Fermi surface, with values from ∼15 to 45 fs that are correlated with the Fermi surface topology. We compute room-temperature resistivities in excellent agreement with experiment by combining GW quasiparticle band structures, Wannier-interpolated band velocities, and ab initio relaxation times. We introduce an importance sampling scheme to speed up the convergence of resistivity and transport calculations.

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