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The semiconductor Bloch equations (abbreviated as SBEs) describe the optical response of semiconductors excited by coherent classical light sources, such as lasers. They are based on a full quantum theory, and form a closed set of integro-differential equations for the quantum dynamics of microscopic polarization and charge carrier distribution. The SBEs are named after the structural analogy to the optical Bloch equations that describe the excitation dynamics in a two-level atom interacting with a classical electromagnetic field. As the major complication beyond the atomic approach, the SBEs must address the many-body interactions resulting from Coulomb force among charges and the coupling among lattice vibrations and electrons. The SBEs are one of the most sophisticated and successful approaches to describe optical properties of semiconductors originating from the classical light–matter interaction, once the many-body theory are systematically included.
Contents
Background
The optical response of a semiconductor follows if one can determine its macroscopic polarization
where the sum involves crystal-momenta
The derivation of the SBEs starts from a system Hamiltonian that fully includes the free-particles, Coulomb interaction, dipole interaction between classical light and electronic states, as well as the phonon contributions. Like almost always in many-body physics, it is most convenient to apply the second-quantization formalism after the appropriate system Hamiltonian
Due to the many-body interactions within
At operator level, the microscopic polarization is defined by an expectation value for a single electronic transition between a valence and a conduction band. In second quantization, conduction-band electrons are defined by fermionic creation and annihilation operators
that describe transition amplitudes for moving an electron from conduction to valence band (
It is also convenient to follow the distribution of electronic vacancies, i.e., the holes,
that are left to the valence band due to optical excitation processes.
Principal structure of SBEs
The quantum dynamics of optical excitations yields an integro-differential equations that constitute the SBEs
These contain the renormalized Rabi energy
as well as the renormalized carrier energy
where
The symbolically denoted
All these correlation effects can be systematically included by solving also the dynamics of two-particle correlations. At this level of sophistication, one can use the SBEs to predict optical response of semiconductors without phenomenological parameters, which gives the SBEs a very high degree of predictability. Indeed, one can use the SBEs in order to predict suitable laser designs through the accurate knowledge they produce about the semiconductor's gain spectrum. One can even use the SBEs to deduce existence of correlations, such as bound excitons, from quantitative measurements.
The presented SBEs are formulated in the momentum space since carrier's crystal momentum follows from
Interpretation and consequences
The
Conceptually,
However, a real exciton is a true two-particle correlation because one must then have a correlation between one electron to another hole. Therefore, the appearance of exciton resonances in the polarization does not signify the presence of excitons because
Therefore, it is often customary to specify optical resonances as excitonic instead of exciton resonances. The actual role of excitons on optical response can only be deduced by quantitative changes to induce to the linewidth and energy shift of excitonic resonances.
The solutions of the Wannier equation can produces valuable insight to the basic properties of a semiconductor's optical response. In particular, one can solve the steady-state solutions of the SBEs to predict optical absorption spectrum analytically with the so-called Elliott formula. In this form, one can verify that an unexcited semiconductor shows several excitonic absorption resonances well below the fundamental bandgap energy. Obviously, this situation cannot be probing excitons because the initial many-body system does not contain electrons and holes to begin with. Furthermore, the probing can, in principle, be performed so gently that one essentially does not excite electron–hole pairs. This gedanken experiment illustrates nicely why one can detect excitonic resonances without having excitons in the system, all due to virtue of Coulomb coupling among transition amplitudes.
Extensions
The SBEs are particularly useful when solving the light propagation through a semiconductor structure. In this case, one needs to solve the SBEs together with the Maxwell's equations driven by the optical polarization. This self-consistent set is called the Maxwell–SBEs and is frequently applied to analyze present-day experiments and to simulate device designs.
At this level, the SBEs provide an extremely versatile method that describes linear as well as nonlinear phenomena such as excitonic effects, propagation effects, semiconductor microcavity effects, four-wave-mixing, polaritons in semiconductor microcavities, gain spectroscopy, and so on. One can also generalize the SBEs by including excitation with terahertz (THz) fields that are typically resonant with intraband transitions. One can also quantize the light field and investigate quantum-optical effects that result. In this situation, the SBEs become coupled to the semiconductor luminescence equations.