Resonance energies and linewidths of Rydberg excitons in Cu$_2$O quantum wells

Abstract

Rydberg excitons are the solid-state analog of Rydberg atoms and can, e.g., for cuprous oxide, easily reach a large size in the region of $\mu$m for principal quantum numbers up to $n=25$. The fabrication of quantum well-like structures in the crystal leads to quantum confinement effects and opens the possibility to study a crossover from three-dimensional to two-dimensional excitons. For small widths of the quantum well (QW) there are several well separated Rydberg series between various scattering thresholds leading to the occurrence of electron-hole resonances with finite lifetimes above the lowest threshold. By application of the stabilization method to the parametric dependencies of the real-valued eigenvalues of the original three-dimensional Schr\"{o}dinger equation we calculate the resonance energies and linewidths for Rydberg excitons in QWs in regimes where a perturbative treatment is impossible. The positions and finite linewidths of resonances at energies above the third threshold are compared with the complex resonance energies obtained within the framework of the complex-coordinate-rotation technique. The excellent agreement between the results demonstrates the validity of both methods for intermediate sizes of the QW-like structures, and thus for arbitrary widths.

Locations

• arXiv (Cornell University) - View - PDF