On determining the strength of the electron-phonon interaction from electron energy relaxation times

The strength of the electron-phonon interaction is most straightforwardly determined from electron energy relaxation times, provided that an appropriate relaxation scheme is assumed. We use literature data from fs spectroscopy on materials with different strengths of electron-phonon interaction to show that the commonly used two-temperature model is not suitable and a recently proposed non-equilibrium model should be used instead. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4726164]