Calculated lifetimes of hot electrons in aluminum and copper using a plane-wave basis set

We report about the lifetimes of hot electrons in crystalline aluminum and copper. For aluminum the results agree quantitatively with the experimental results. For copper we get good agreement for quasiparticle energies in th e (110) direction above 2 eV which shows that the lifetimes far quasipartic le states above 2 eV are determined by sp bands, explaining the puzzling fa ct that simple Fermi liquid theory describes Cu in this direction quite wel l. The calculations were performed within the shielded interaction approxim ation using a plane-wave basis expansion for the wave functions. We show th at for Cu this basis leads to equally good results as the more demanding li nearized augmented plane-wave basis.