A Many-Body Theory of the Optical Conductivity of Excitons and Trions in Two-Dimensional Materials

Abstract: The optical spectra of two dimensional (2D) materials exhibit sharp absorption peaks that are commonly identified with exciton and trions (or charged excitons). In this paper, we show that excitons and trions in doped 2D materials can be described by two coupled Schrodinger-like equations - one two-body equation for excitons and another four-body equation for trions. In electron doped 2D materials, a bound trion state is identified with a four-body bound state of an exciton and an excited conduction band electron-hole pair. In doped 2D materials, the exciton and the trions states are the not the eigenstates of the full Hamiltonian and their respective Schrodinger equations are coupled due to Coulomb interactions. The strength of this coupling increases with the doping density. Solutions of these two coupled equations can quantitatively explain all the prominent features experimentally observed in the optical absorption spectra of 2D materials including the observation of two prominent absorption peaks and the variation of their energy splittings and spectral shapes and strengths with the electron density. The optical conductivity obtained in our work satisfies the optical conductivity sum rule exactly. A superposition of exciton and trion states can be used to construct a solution of the two coupled Schrodinger equations and this solution resembles the variational exciton-polaron state, thereby establishing the relationship between our approach and Fermi polaron physics.