Two-Particle Tight-Binding Description of Higher-Harmonic Generation in Semiconductor Nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum mechanical tight-binding model for semiconductor nanostructures that accurately describes higher-harmonic generation, incorporating two-particle correlations, relaxation mechanisms, and electron emission with less computational effort.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tight-binding approach that captures two-particle correlations and relaxation effects for higher-harmonic generation in nanostructures, reducing computational complexity.

Findings

Accurately models higher-harmonic generation in nanostructures.

Replicates semiconductor Bloch Equation results for bulk materials.

Enables efficient simulation using material data from density-functional theory.

Abstract

We develop a quantum mechanical theory to describe the optical response of semiconductor nanostructures with a particular emphasis on higher-order harmonic Generation. Based on a tight-binding approach we take all two-particle correlations into account thus describing the creation, evolution and annihilation of electron and holes. In the limiting case of bulk materials, we obtain the same precision as that achieved by solving the well-established semiconductor Bloch Equations. For semiconducting structures of finite extent, we also incorporate the surrounding space thus enabling a description of electron emission. In addition, we incorporate different relaxation mechanisms such as dephasing and damping of intraband currents. Moreover, the advantage of our description is that, starting from extremely precise material data as e.g., from tight-binding parameters obtained from density-functional-theory calculations, we obtain a numerical description being by far less computationally challenging and resource-demanding as comparable ab-initio approaches, e.g., those based on time-dependent density functional theory.