Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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HL: Fachverband Halbleiterphysik

HL 44: Optical Properties I

HL 44.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 09:30–10:00, H10

Rydberg excitons in cuprous oxide — •Manfred Bayer — Experimentelle Physik 2, TU Dortmund, Germany

Excitons, bound electron-hole complexes, are decisive for the optical properties of semiconductors. Thereby their description as hydrogen atom-like complexes has turned out to be extremely useful. In Rydberg atoms an electron is promoted into a state with high principal quantum number. The atom becomes a mesoscopic object then with dimensions in the micrometer-range, with which, for example, the transition from quantum to classical dynamics can be studied. Recently it has been shown that also excitons can be highly excited by observing states with principal quantum number up to n=25 in high-quality natural cuprous oxide crystals [1]. This corresponds to an average radius of more than a micrometer so that the exciton wave function is extended over more than 10 billion crystal unit cells. In this contribution similarities and differences of these Rydberg-excitons with their atomic counterparts will be addressed.

[1] T. Kazimierczuk, D. Fröhlich, S. Scheel, H. Stolz, and M. Bayer, Nature 514, 343 (2014).