Do we need to revisit the Bohr exciton radius of hot excitons?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of hot excitons in PbS nanocrystallites, proposing a new empirical concept of 'effective Bohr exciton radius' and analyzing how size and temperature influence excitonic resonances and scattering processes.

Contribution

It introduces the notion of an 'effective Bohr exciton radius' considering non-static screening effects and discusses how hot exciton transport impacts impact ionization efficiency in quantum dots.

Findings

Collisional broadening varies with nanocrystal size and temperature.

Hot exciton ballistic transport can suppress exciton-exciton scattering.

Impact ionization efficiency depends on an intermediate size window.

Abstract

We report collisional broadening of the E3 excitonic resonances in optical absorption spectra of PbS nanocrystallites of widely varying sizes. Significance of the underlying extended band structure of bulk solids to understand the physics of exciton scattering in semiconductor nanocrystallites of this size range is discussed. We propose an empirical notion of 'effective Bohr exciton radius' as a direct consequence of significant departure from usual static screening limits of coulomb interactions of 'hot' excitons in the region of strong dispersion at energies much above the fundamental band gap. Temperature variation of excitonic resonance reveals how non-phonon energy relaxation processes affects the collisional broadening of E3 resonance over this size range. We argue that ballistic transport of hot excitons can suppress exciton-exciton scattering necessary for photo-induced impact ionization in very small quantum dots. This evidently indicates that impact ionization of hot excitons may be efficient only inside an intermediate nanoscale 'size window'.