Fermionic vs. bosonic thermalization in the phonon-driven exciton dynamics: An analytic dimensionality study

TL;DR

This paper analytically investigates how excitons in semiconductors thermalize, revealing the roles of fermionic and bosonic interactions and how phonon types influence exciton ground state occupation.

Contribution

It provides a microscopic, analytical framework for understanding exciton thermalization, including fermionic effects and the influence of phonon scattering beyond the pure bosonic approximation.

Findings

Fermionic and bosonic scattering processes coexist in exciton dynamics.

Quasielastic phonon scattering favors bosonic ground state occupation.

Optical phonons hinder macroscopic exciton ground state occupation.

Abstract

Excitons are compound particles formed from an electron and a hole in semiconductors. The impact of this substructure on the phonon-exciton interaction is described by a closed system of microscopic scattering equations. To calculate the actual excitonic thermalization properties beyond the pure bosonic picture, this equation is derived directly from an electron-hole picture within the Heisenberg equation of motion framework. In addition to the well-known bosonic character of the compound particles, we identified processes of a repulsive, fermionic type, as well as attractive carrier exchange contributing to the scattering process. In this analytical study we give general statements about the thermalization of excitons in two and three dimensional semiconductors. We give insights on the strong dependence of the thermalization characteristics of the exciton Bohr radius and the thermalization wavelength. Above all, we analytically provide arguments why a bosonic behavior of excitons - such as an enhanced ground state occupation - requires the dominant phonon scattering to be quasielastic. Acoustic phonons tend to fulfil this, as each scattering event only takes small amounts of energy out of the distribution, while optical phonons tend to prevent macroscopic occupations of the lowest exciton state, since the Pauli repulsion between the individual carriers will then dominate the thermalization dynamics.