Composite excitonic states in doped semiconductors

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze composite excitonic states in doped semiconductors, focusing on electron-doped monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides, revealing complex bound states influenced by many-body interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a general variational approach to compute composite excitonic states in doped semiconductors, accounting for many-body effects and band structure differences.

Findings

Identification of tightly-bound trion cores in doped monolayer TMDs

Discovery of satellite electron states in ML-WSe₂

Quantitative analysis of excitonic states influenced by Fermi sea interactions

Abstract

We present a theoretical model of composite excitonic states in doped semiconductors. Many-body interactions between a photoexcited electron-hole pair and the electron gas are integrated into a computationally tractable few-body problem, solved by the variational method. We focus on electron-doped ML-MoSe$_2$ and ML-WSe$_2$ due to the contrasting character of their conduction bands. In both cases, the core of the composite is a tightly-bound trion (two electrons and valence-band hole), surrounded by a region depleted of electrons. The composite in ML-WSe$_2$ further includes a satellite electron with different quantum numbers. The theory is general and can be applied to semiconductors with various energy-band properties, allowing one to calculate their excitonic states and to quantify the interaction with the Fermi sea.