Ground state energy of N Frenkel excitons

TL;DR

This paper derives the ground state energy of N Frenkel excitons using many-body theory, revealing that their collective energy behaves as if they are elementary bosons due to a delicate cancellation of fermion exchange effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that N Frenkel excitons exhibit a first-order density dependence similar to elementary bosons, despite their composite fermionic nature, due to exact cancellations in many-body effects.

Findings

Ground state energy of N Frenkel excitons derived in Born approximation.

Frenkel excitons behave as elementary bosons at the collective level.

Fermion exchange effects cancel out at leading order, simplifying their many-body description.

Abstract

By using the composite many-body theory for Frenkel excitons we have recently developed, we here derive the ground state energy of $N$ Frenkel excitons in the Born approximation through the Hamiltonian mean value in a state made of $N$ identical $\mathbf{Q=0}$ excitons. While this quantity reads as a density expansion in the case of Wannier excitons, due to many-body effects induced by fermion exchanges between $N$ composite particles, we show that the Hamiltonian mean value for $N$ Frenkel excitons only contains a first order term in density, just as for elementary bosons. Such a simple result comes from a subtle balance, difficult to guess a priori, between fermion exchanges for two or more Frenkel excitons appearing in Coulomb term and the ones appearing in the $N$ exciton normalization factor - the cancellation being exact within terms in $1/N_{s}$ where $N_{s}$ is the number of atomic sites in the sample. This result could make us naively believe that, due to the tight binding approximation on which Frenkel excitons are based, these excitons are just bare elementary bosons while their composite nature definitely appears at various stages in the precise calculation of the Hamiltonian mean value.