Excitonic giant-dipole potentials in cuprous oxide

Markus Kurz, Peter Grünwald, Stefan Scheel
2017 Physical review B  
In this work we predict the existence of a novel species of Wannier excitons when exposed to crossed electric and magnetic fields. In particular, we present a theory of giant-dipole excitons in Cu_2 O in crossed fields. Within our theoretical approach we perform a pseudoseparation of the center-of-mass motion for the field-dressed excitonic species, thereby obtaining an effective single-particle Hamiltonian for the relative motion. For arbitrary gauge fields we exactly separate the
more » ... nt kinetic energy terms from the effective single-particle interaction potential. Depending on the applied field strengths and the specific field orientation, the potential for the relative motion of electron and hole exhibits an outer well at spatial separations up to several micrometers and depths up to 380 μ eV, leading to possible permanent excitonic electric dipole moments of around three million Debye.
doi:10.1103/physrevb.95.245205 fatcat:wycxi56mxjdvlmxiegciz36jna