Lifetime of excited electrons in transition metals -: art. no. 153101

We present ab initio calculations for the lifetime of excited electrons in transition metals. The computations were done using a pseudopotential approach in connection with a plane-wave expansion of the wave functions. The lifetimes for each element are resolved for various bands and with respect to certain directions of the crystal momentum. Our results reveal rather different trends for different transition metals showing the impossibility to work with simple models, thus emphasizing the need for first-principles calculations.