Exciton ground-state energy with full hole warping structure

TL;DR

This paper provides an exact numerical analysis of the exciton ground-state energy in zinc-blende semiconductors, fully accounting for valence band warping, revealing significant potential corrections to simplified models.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical method to exactly solve the exciton ground state considering full valence band warping in zinc-blende semiconductors, surpassing angular averaging approximations.

Findings

Ground state is fourfold degenerate.

Warping correction can be as large as 15%.

Corrections are significant for accurate exciton energy calculations.

Abstract

Most semiconductors, in particular III-V compounds, have a complex valence band structure near the band edge, due to degeneracy at the zone center. One peculiar feature is the warping of the electronic dispersion relations, which are not isotropic even in the vicinity of the band edge. When the exciton, all important for the semiconductor optical properties, is considered, this problem is usually handled by using some kind of angular averaging procedure, that would restore the isotropy of the hole effective dispersion relations. In the present paper, we consider the problem of the exciton ground-state energy for semiconductors with zinc-blende crystal structure, and we solve it exactly by a numerical treatment, taking fully into account the warping of the valence band. In the resulting four-dimensional problem, we first show exactly that the exciton ground state is fourfold degenerate. We then explore the ground-state energy across the full range of allowed Luttinger parameters. We find that the correction due to warping may in principle be quite large. However, for the semiconductors with available data for the band structure we have considered, the correction turns out to be in the $10\% - 15\%$ range.