Eur. Phys. J. B 68, 161-181 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00086-6

Composite boson many-body theory for Frenkel excitons

¹ Institut des NanoSciences de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, CNRS, 140 rue de Lourmel, 75015 Paris, France
² Institute for Theoretical and Applied Electrodynamics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Izhorskaya 13/19, 125412 Moscow, Russia

Corresponding author: ^a monique.combescot@insp.jussieu.fr

Received: 20 October 2008
Revised: 20 January 2009
Published online: 14 March 2009

Abstract

We present a many-body theory for Frenkel excitons which takes into account their composite nature exactly. Our approach is based on four commutators similar to the ones we previously proposed for Wannier excitons. They allow us to calculate any physical quantity dealing with N excitons in terms of “Pauli scatterings” for carrier exchange in the absence of carrier interaction and “interaction scatterings” for carrier interactions in the absence of carrier exchange. We show that Frenkel excitons have a novel “transfer assisted exchange scattering”, specific to these excitons. It comes from indirect Coulomb processes between localized atomic states. These indirect processes, commonly called “electron-hole exchange” in the case of Wannier excitons and most often neglected, are crucial for Frenkel excitons, as they are the only ones responsible for the excitation transfer. We also show that in spite of the fact that Frenkel excitons are made of electrons and holes on the same atomic site, so that we could naively see them as elementary particles, they definitely are composite objects, their composite nature appearing through various properties, not always easy to guess. The present many-body theory for Frenkel excitons is thus going to appear as highly valuable to securely tackle their many-body physics, as in the case of nonlinear optical effects in organic semiconductors.